API Portals

Oh the places we go

Overview

Retail
Enterprise
Social
Travel
Finance
Music
Flickr API
- Google
Data.gov
Other APIs
Mashups
More on API Microservices

An inventory of APIs is available from:

API Harmony (IBM)
ProgammableWeb.com
https://apis-guru.github.io is the UI for https://github.com/APIs-guru/api-models is a repository of APIs you can search while off-line.

Below are some major ones API developers should know about:

Retail

Ebay reports $7 billion worth of sales through APIs.
Amazon
Walmart Labs
Best Buy no loger issues API keys to gmail and other free email accounts
Starbucks

http://docs.coffeesender.apiary.io/#

Enterprise

Video: Exposing Salesforce REST Services Using Swagger 2013

https://github.com/jesperf/force-rest-api by Jasper Joergensen at Heroku

https://github.com/ryanbrainard/force-rest- adds caching (also in Maven Central)

Salesforce
Twitter reports 10 times more traffic via API than their website.
Facebook

Travel

Expedia travel
Everytrail has rich information on travel sites and media about them. It returns XML. A wiki is provided.

Finance

Capital One is a trail-blazer for banks opening up APIs.

Music

https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/ lets your applications fetch data from the Spotify music catalog and manage user’s playlists and saved music.

Flickr API

Yahoo Flickr photos

Flickr provides an API to access images contributed by its users.

Flicker was purchased by Yahoo, which is why API keys for it are obtained through a Yahoo sign-on.

The description:

  https://www.flickr.com/services/developer

and the App Garden at:

  https://www.flickr.com/services/api/

of code using code from:

  http://code.flickr.net/

Management console:

http://apigee.com/console/flickr

Google

Google’s maps is the most-referenced API according to ProgrammableWeb.

Among Google’s many API products:

Google’s Civic Infomation API enables developers to build applications that let citizens and voters know about their political representation and voting locations. First released in 2012, it supplies official information for every state and the District of Columbia. Version 2 released in 2015 adds ballot drop-off and early voting locations.

Data.gov

Top Five Findings for API Developers from Pew Research Center

US federal jobs

http://usasearch.howto.gov/developer/jobs.html collects jobs posted by government at several levels (federal, state, etc.).

No API is required for access.

A sample free-form query:

http://api.usa.gov/jobs/search.json?query=telecommute+jobs

US Weather

http://graphical.weather.gov/xml/rest.php provides weather prediction in XML.

A sample request:

http://graphical.weather.gov/xml/sample_products/browser_interface/ndfdXMLclient.php?lat=48.99&lon=-77.01&product=glance

Elements are described at http://graphical.weather.gov/xml/docs/elementInputNames.php

product “time-series”
end=2016-05-01T0:00:00

BLAH: Sample code to present the information is not provided by the site.

US Census

http://www.census.gov/developers contains a wide list of data available freely.

BLAH: Even though this site is maintained by a federal organization, not all datasets have data for the entire nation (all 50 states of the union and territories).

The javascript SDK for US Census Bureau data stored at GitHub CitySDK and described at https://uscensusbureau.github.io/citysdk, includes simple integrations to facilitate mash-up of other open datasets.

The JavaScript uses the “Module pattern” of coding that uses a “closure”.

A sample end point for data from the 2010 census for all states:

api.census.gov/data/2010/sf1?key=...&get=P0010001,NAME=&for=state:*

The … above is replaced by each user’s own API key obtained from email after registration at http://api.census.gov/data/citysdk.html

US White House

https://github.com/WhiteHouse/api-standards#pragmatic-rest was created with participation by Kin Lane.

Other APIs

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/04/wanted-simple-apis-without-authentication/ lists several.

Ford
GM
Citrix

Mashups

A mashup app combines data from several Web APIs in its presentation.

More on API Microservices

This is one of a series:

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