Simon Willison’s Weblog

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7 items tagged “webapis”

2020

SQL is a better API language than GraphQL – Convince me otherwise (via) A dumb tweet I posted this morning blew up today and ended up on the Hacker News homepage.

# 16th April 2020, 10:44 pm / hacker-news, sql, webapis, graphql

2019

paginate-json (via) I released a fun tiny utility: paginate-json, which knows how to paginate through JSON APIs that use the HTTP Link header for pagination. I built it so I could pull data from the GitHub API and pipe it directly into SQLite via sqlite-utils.

# 12th June 2019, 3:22 pm / json, projects, webapis, sqlite-utils

2018

Develop Your Naturalist Superpowers with Observable Notebooks and iNaturalist (via) Natalie’s article for this year’s 24 ways advent calendar shows how you can use Observable notebooks to quickly build interactive visualizations against web APIs. She uses the iNaturalist API to show species of Nudibranchs that you might see in a given month, plus a Vega-powered graph of sightings over the course of the year. This really inspired me to think harder about how I can use Observable to solve some of my API debugging needs, and I’ve already spun up a couple of private Notebooks to exercise new APIs that I’m building at work. It’s a huge productivity boost.

# 18th December 2018, 10:39 pm / natalie-downe, webapis, inaturalist, observable, nudibranchs

2017

Datasette: instantly create and publish an API for your SQLite databases

I just shipped the first public version of datasette, a new tool for creating and publishing JSON APIs for SQLite databases.

[... 968 words]

2010

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.

# 16th August 2010, 7:12 pm / apis, errors, webapis, recovered

2007

Facebook Query Language. The Facebook API now lets you run SQL-like queries. You can’t do joins but you can perform very simple subselects.

# 25th February 2007, 12:06 pm / apis, facebook, sql, webapis

2005

W3C Web APIs Working Group (via) A welcome addition.

# 18th November 2005, 3:36 pm / w3c, webapis