APIs
ProvoJS - July 2015
API:
Application
Programming
Interface
Interfaces
$wamp.subscribe('com.myapp.hello', eventHandler);GET https://api.spotify.com/v1/search?q=david+bowie&type=artistGUI
Code
Web API
HTTP
Hypertext Transfer Protocol
A client sends a request to a server.
The server sends a response back.
Your web browser:
The HTTP Request:
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: provojs.org
Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/43.0.2357.130 Safari/537.36
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,th;q=0.6
The HTTP Response:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu)
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2015 06:42:32 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
X-Powered-By: Express
Content-Encoding: gzip
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title>ProvoJS</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>ProvoJS</h1>
<p><a href="/slack">Join the Slack community</a></p>
<p><a href="http://meetup.com/provojs">Meetup.com</a></p>
<p><a href="http://github.com/provojs">Github.com</a></p>
</body>
</html>A web API is a URL that returns data instead of documents.
Calling the Spotify API
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2015 07:07:37 GMT
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
{
"artists" : {
"href" : "https://api.spotify.com/v1/search?query=david+bowie&offset=0&limit=20&type=artist",
"items" : [ {
"external_urls" : {
"spotify" : "https://open.spotify.com/artist/0oSGxfWSnnOXhD2fKuz2Gy"
},
"followers" : {
"href" : null,
"total" : 803332
},
"genres" : [ "art rock", "glam rock", "permanent wave" ],
"href" : "https://api.spotify.com/v1/artists/0oSGxfWSnnOXhD2fKuz2Gy",
"id" : "0oSGxfWSnnOXhD2fKuz2Gy",
"images" : [ {
"height" : 1369,
"url" : "https://i.scdn.co/image/8067482fe4a138a90caa1ebf6f9d4e4dc44e9885",
"width" : 1000
}, {
"height" : 876,
"url" : "https://i.scdn.co/image/8346e5f95cf3bd27501e6cd18293846b811d80df",
"width" : 640
} ],
"name" : "David Bowie",
"popularity" : 81,
"type" : "artist",
"uri" : "spotify:artist:0oSGxfWSnnOXhD2fKuz2Gy"
} ],
"limit" : 20,
"next" : "https://api.spotify.com/v1/search?query=david+bowie&offset=20&limit=20&type=artist",
"offset" : 0,
"previous" : null,
"total" : 22
}
}GET https://api.spotify.com/v1/search?q=david+bowie&type=artistEveryday APIs
- Spotify
- Gmail
- Google Search
- Google Maps
- Slack
- YouTube
Awesome APIs
- Star Wars: https://swapi.co/
- Pokemon: http://pokeapi.co/
- Memes: https://api.imgflip.com/
- Reaction GIFs: https://api.giphy.com/
- Deck of Cards: http://deckofcardsapi.com/
Find cool APIs at
https://www.mashape.com/
Making our own API
https://github.com/ProvoJS/node-api-server
A Simple NodeJS API Server
// Set up the server, using the express module.
var express = require('express');
var app = express();
// Define an API endpoint: GET /info
app.get('/info', function (request, response) {
//This function gets run every time a user visits the '/info' page.
//Send this data back to the user.
response.json({
meetup: 'ProvoJS',
awesomeness: '100%'
});
});
// Start listening for incoming connections on port 4000.
var server = app.listen(4000, function() {
console.log('API Server listening at http://localhost:4000/');
});
Run the server
git clone https://github.com/ProvoJS/node-api-server.git
cd node-api-server/
npm install
node example.js
# Now visit http://localhost:4000/info in your web browser!API Server Project
Run the server:
npm start
Finish implementing the API:
api-server.js
database.js
APIs - ProvoJS, July 2015
By Andrew Jensen
