89 items tagged “apis”
2011
Are there any Meta APIs?
Embed.ly is a good example of this kind of API—it gives you one endpoint which wraps oembed APIs on dozens of other services (plus a bunch of custom scraping code). We use it as part of our video/slide embedding feature on http://lanyrd.com/
How we made an API for BoingBoing in an evening. Fluidinfo really is a fascinating piece of software. The team loaded in 11 years of BoingBoing content, allowing you to run structured queries against the data using their standard API, but also allowing users to attach their own information to the same corpus using Fluidinfo tags. Writable APIs are much less common than read-only APIs—Fluidinfo instantly provides both.
Google APIs & Developer Products. Presented as a sort-of-periodic table. There’s quite a bit of stuff on here I didn’t know about.
Tip: Flickr standard photo response as slideshow. Neat trick—you can construct a URL to Flickr’s slideshow widget that includes the results of any API method, including the all-powerful flickr.photos.search. It’s a shame you can’t embed the resulting slideshow in an iframe.
Introducing the FluidDB Explorer. Every good API deserves a dedicated API browser.
2010
What are some scalable OAuth and OpenID server implementations?
Any OAuth library should scale horizontally—I can’t see how any one library would be a better choice than another.
[... 36 words]Does Twitter use a 3rd party software for rate limiting their APIs? If yes, who’s the 3rd party?
I wrote up a technique for doing simple rate limiting using memcached a while ago, which I later found out was somewhat similar to how the Twitter API does it.
[... 56 words]What is the best way to maintain a API wrapper class across multiple languages?
1. Use JSON for your API. That takes away a lot of the necessity for an API wrapper, since it means you’re automatically returning native data types (hashes, lists, strings etc) for most programming languages.
[... 175 words]What company had the first API?
They weren’t the first to have an API, but Flickr were the first consumer web site that really pushed the concept in my opinion. They originally promoted it as “you can always get your data back if you want to”, but they then greatly benefited from the ecosystem that grew up around it.
[... 65 words]Yahoo! Developer Network: Important API Updates and Changes. Some important (and potentially worrying) news about Yahoo! APIs. The BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) API will no longer be free—not an enormous surprise, and hopefully the pricing will be sensible. Most of the other search APIs (including web, news and image search) are being turned off with no replacement, while term extraction and spelling suggestions will be YQL-only. Most worrying, changes to Geo, Maps and Local APIs will be announced in September, with some set to close. I really hope this doesn’t affect the GeoPlanet APIs.
Writing Bulletproof Apps with API Errorpoints. This is a very good idea: Web APIs should offer special API endpoints for simulating each of the possible errors that might be returned by the production API.
Closure Compiler Service (via) A hosted version of the Google Closure Compiler (JavaScript minifier) running on App Engine. It has both a user interface and a REST API, which means you can use it as part of an automated build process without needing to set up a local copy of the software.
TfL Live Traffic Cameras. Part of the new set of APIs released by the Greater London Authority—a list of 177 live traffic camera feeds from around London, all geocoded.
What’s powering the Content API? The new Guardian Content API runs on Solr, scaled using EC2 and Solr replication and with a Scala web service layer sitting between Solr and the API’s end users.
GeoPlanet Explorer. Chris Heilmann’s YQL powered explorer for the invaluable Yahoo! GeoPlanet / WhereOnEarth dataset. Every API deserves an explorer of some sort.
2009
OSM static map api. A very welcome addition to the OpenStreetMap world (with plenty of options for overlaying points, polygons etc) slightly marred by the size and relative ugliness of the OpenStreetMap watermark.
Cloudvox. A brand new startup offering “API-driven phone calls” with a beautifully simple webhooks based API.
Google Docs OCR. Whoa, the Google Docs API just got really interesting—you can upload an image to it (POST /feeds/default/private/full?ocr=true) and it will OCR the text and turn it in to a document. Since this is Google, I imagine they’ll also be using the processed documents to further improve their OCR technology.
Exploring OAuth-Protected APIs. One of the downsides of OAuth is that it makes debugging APIs in your browser much harder. Seth Fitzsimmons’ oauth-proxy solves this by running a Twisted-powered proxy on your local machine which OAuth-signs every request going through it using your consumer key, secret and tokens for that API. Using it with a browsers risks exposing your key and token (but not secret) to sites you accidentally browse to—it would be useful if you could pass a whitelist of API domains as a command line option to the proxy.
YQL: INSERT INTO internet. insert into twitter.status (status,username,password) values (“Playing with INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE in YQL”, “twitterusername”,“twitterpassword”)
The Twitpocalypse is Near: Will Your Twitter Client Survive? Twitter tweet IDs will shortly tick over past the maximum signed 32 bit integer, potentially breaking applications. I learnt this lesson when the same thing happened to Flickr photo IDs: never store numeric IDs from external systems as integers, always use strings.
Google Maps Data API (via) I’m disappointed by this one—it’s really just a CRUD store for the KML files used in Google MyMaps. It would be a lot more useful if it let you perform geospatial calculations against your stored map data using some kind of query API—a cloud service alternative to tools like PostGIS.
resty. 58 lines of bash provides a better command-line interface to RESTful APIs, using curl under the hood. This should save me from running “man curl” several times a week.
The Little Manual of API Design (PDF). A concise, highly readable guide to designing APIs that are “Complete, Easy to learn and memorize, lead to readable code, hard to misuse, and easy to extend”, based on lessons learnt over many years of development of the Qt framework.
django-piston. Promising looking Django mini-framework for creating RESTful APIs, from the bitbucket team. Ticks all of Jacob’s boxes, even including built-in pluggable authentication support with HTTP Basic, Digest and OAuth out of the box.
With YQL Execute, the Internet becomes your database. This is nuts (in a good way). Yahoo!’s intriguing universal SQL-style XML/JSONP web service interface now supports JavaScript as a kind of stored procedure language, meaning you can use JavaScript and E4X to screen-scrape web pages, then query the results with YQL.
A few notes on the Guardian Open Platform
This morning we launched the Guardian Open Platform at a well attended event in our new offices in Kings Place. This is one of the main projects I’ve been helping out with since joining the Guardian last year, and it’s fantastic to finally have it out in the open.
[... 839 words]Panda Tuesday; The History of the Panda, New APIs, Explore and You. Flickr’s Rainbow Vomiting Panda of Awesomeness now has a family of associated APIs.
Web Hooks and the Programmable World of Tomorrow. Tour de force presentation on Web Hooks by Jeff Lindsay. Tons of really good ideas—provided your application isn’t Flickr sized, there’s a good chance you could implement web hooks pretty cheaply and unleash a huge flurry of creativity from your users. GitHub makes a great case study here.
YQL opens up 3rd-party web service table definitions to developers. This really is astonishingly clever: you can create an XML file telling Yahoo!’s YQL service how to map an arbitrary API to YQL tables, then make SQL-style queries against it (including joins against other APIs). Another neat trick: doing a SQL “in” query causes API requests to be run in parallel and recombined before being returned to you.