Category: Useful APIs

In the software development world, practice makes perfect. Therefore, we should find as many ways to practice programming as possible. With free public APIs, we can practice programming by creating apps that use those APIs.

In this article, we’ll look at some practice project ideas that can use some of those APIs.

HTML to PDF Converter

We can use the pdflayer API to convert HTML documents from files and URLs to PDFs.

All we need is an API key and then we can use it convert HTML to PDFs with little effort.

Document Bookmarker

The Pocket API lets us use their bookmarking service to add, change, and remove bookmarks via their API.

It let us automate the process and view articles that are bookmarked via the API.

With the Article View API, the whole document’s content is returned and we can use it to display the data.

To-Do Lists

We can use some todo list APIs like Todoist and Wunderlist to create our own programs to create todo lists that save that on those service providers via their APIs.

The Todoist API can do a lot like creating projects, templates, items, labels, notes, project notes, file uploads, etc.

Also, we can create set reminders and due dates for todo tasks.

These are things that’ll take a lot of effort on our end to do. With this API, we can do that with half the effort since we eliminated the need to build an API to do all that.

The Wunderlist API has similar capabilities. We can do the same things with it, put add memberships for accessing todo lists.

And we can create webhooks to create todo lists.

Event Information App

There’s APIs for big event websites like Eventbrite, Picatic, Ticketmaster which can be used to retrieve events.

The Eventbrite API gives us access to their API via OAuth. It gives us data on event capacity, description, schedule, teams, and more.

We can also get data on organizations’ data including their members and their roles.

Furthermore, we can get the seat map for various venues with it.

The Ticketmaster API provides similar data as the Eventbrite API so that we can get the same kind of data with it. The difference is that we use an API key for authentication instead of OAuth.

Food and Drink Apps

We can get data from various food and drink APIs like the LCBO API to get alcohol data from the government liquor store in Ontario, Canada.

It has data on images, winery information, retail locations of the liquor store chain, inventory of liquor in different locations and more.

If we want to create a food app, we can create an app using the Recipe Puppy API.

The API only has one endpoint. We can search for recipes store in the database behind the API with the keywords we enter in.

It supports pagination so that it won’t overwhelm their API servers.

Restaurant App

A restaurant app is a useful app for discovering restaurants. Frameworks like the Zomato API lets us get information like restaurant name and location, reviews, menus, etc.

All we need is an API key to access their data.

We can also get restaurant data organized by various things like categories, cities, collections, cuisines, and geolocation coordinates.

It can also be used to find the daily menu, restaurant info, and reviews for a given restaurant.

Beer App

With the PunkAPI, we can create our own app to look up beer information.

No authentication is required for this API, but there’s a rate limit for a given IP address.

It returns data like beer name, the yeast beer is made from, the year range that the beer is brewed, and the hops and malt content.

It can also return a random beer.

Conclusion

We can do a lot with free APIs. There are APIs to convert HTML to PDF, so we can make our own document format converter app.

Also, we can get data about restaurants, food, recipes, drinks, and more if we’re interested in food. Therefore, we can use them to make our own apps to search and display the data our way.

Finally, we can make our own apps to display event and venue data so that we can display the data the way we want to.

When we want to build prototypes, we want to build them fast. Therefore, we should find a fake REST API so that we don’t need to write our own for a quick prototype.

In this article, we’ll look at some fake REST APIs that we can use to mock out our back end for prototypes.

JSONPlaceholder

JSONPlaceholder is a useful REST API that lets us do CRUD operators on their server by sending requests to their REST API.

It supports CORS so that we can use them with our front end apps.

The endpoints follow the REST API convention so it’s also great examples for us to follow.

There’re a few endpoints like comments, photos, albums, todos, and posts that we can query and send.

Reqres

Reqres is a useful REST API to let us mock out our API for our front end.

It explicitly says that it supports Ajax requests so we can go ahead and use it with our front end directly.

There’re lots of routes that are available. They include GET, POST, PATCH, and DELETE routes.

Most of the routes are user-related routes, so we can fake an authentication system without building one ourselves.

typicode/json-server

The JSON server program is a Node package that we can run on our local computer.

We can define our routes by providing them with fake JSON data.

Therefore, we can create any route we like, unlike the previous examples.

It’s very configurable and can be adapted to be used in any situation. It supports things like charging ports, HTTPS, custom routes, middleware, and more.

We can also serve static files with it. So it’s more comprehensive than the websites we have above.

Fake it till you make it

Fake it till you make it is another mock back end API that we can use to speed up our development.

It comes with both free and paid tiers, The paid tier have 1000 fake units a day with arrays up to 10 elements in size.

We can get one API token to use the free version.

The nesting depth is up to 1 level deep for the free version. The paid version lets us nest our JSON deeper.

Requests parameters are accepted in the paid version. And paid versions can have custom fields.

Support is also available for the paid versions via email.

Beeceptor

Beeceptor is another web app that lets us mock out a REST API. we can enter a name for our endpoint which is hosted in their subdomain.

It supports all kinds of requests like GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE.

We can also simulate API responses and failures.

Payloads can be inspected for debugging purposes. Also, we can capture HTTP requests in real tine.

Other things it can do include A/B testing and simulate latencies and timeouts. These are all important things since we want to handle error cases in addition to successful cases.

Fake Rest

Fake Rest API is another fake API site. We can use them to mock out endpoints with data included.

Things like address, array, e-commerce data, and much more can all be retrieved right from this app.

We can also add our own data and use them whenever we like. We can specify any description for our endpoints including method name, verb, redirect, Content-Type , response code, and more.

ngduc/api-now

api-now is a Node package that we can run locally on our computer to create a fake API instantly.

It comes with default datasets. Also, it can take .json or .js file for data.

It has some routes like file upload, login, todos, images and more. The login route provides us with a JSON web token for authentication.

Also, it can serve files in a static directory. We just have to run npx api-now to run this package.

Mocky

Mocky is a simple app where we can enter the response we want to generate ourselves and get an endpoint for it on the fly.

We can use it to simulate responses with different status codes, body, and headers.

Conclusion

There’re many fake API apps that we can use to mock out our API for prototypes.

Some include data and some are more configurable. So we can take our pick and choose one that’s right for us.

In the software development world, practice makes perfect. Therefore, we should find as many ways to practice programming as possible.

With free public APIs, we can practice programming by creating apps that use those APIs.

In this article, we’ll look at some practice project ideas that can use some of those APIs.

Animal Photo Apps

We can create animal photo apps easily with a few API. They provide us with URLs of pictures of cute animals like dogs and cats that we can use to create apps with.

Some APIs include the Cat API, which requires an API key before it can be used.

The Dog API is completely open and provides us with data on URLs of dogs and their breeds.

They’re also the RandomCat, RandomDog and RandomFox APIs, which provide animal photos of cats, dogs, and foxes respectively.

The Shibe.Online provides us with random pictures of shiba inu dogs, cats or birds.

Anime App

We can create our own app to display anime data with the AnimeNewsNetwork API. It provides us with anime news in XML format.

This is actually good since it gives us a chance to use libraries to transform XML to JSON in order to use them in our code, thereby learning more about JSON and data in the process.

Also, there’s the AniList API, which provides us with a GraphQL that requires OAuth authentication.

We can all use some practice with both so that we’re prepared for any job that uses OAuth or GraphQL, which are increasingly common technologies used for authentication and building APIs respectively.

GraphQL is useful because it lets us control what kind of data we want to be returned in the response. That kind of control is hard to get with REST APIs.

If you’re fans of Studio Ghibli anime like the Totoro series, there’s also the Studio Ghibli API that gets us data about them all in one API.

Museum App

We can build our own app to display text and images from museums. There’s the Rijksmuseum API that lets us get access to their art collection’s data with one API.

It requires an API key for access so we can use it without much effort.

There’s also the Harvard Art Museums API that lets us access their art collection.

If we want access to icons, we can use the Iconfinder API to get access to their icons by registering for an API key.

Books App

Building a book is great since let us practice displaying data from books. We can use the Google Books API to get access to their vast collection of books.

It also uses OAuth so that we can practice using OAuth to gain access to APIs.

Also, we can get book data from the Open Library API which has data in XML or JSON format. We can change the format within the query string that we use to access the data, so it lets us practice with building query strings and using it to access data.

Trello App

Trello is simple and easy to use task tracker. We can add our own functionality to it by creating power-ups, which are plugins that use the Trello API to customize its functionality to our own liking.

The Trello API lets us do anything to it that we allow by setting the capabilities from our own Trello account’s dashboard.

Google Analytics App

Google Analytics collects data from our websites so we can track the traffic that’s coming and get some insights from it.

To automate this process, we can use the Google Analytics API to get access to the same data that’s displayed in our own programs.

We can then customize the google analytics functionality to our own taste by using the API to write our own programs.

Holidays App

The Calendar Index API gets us holidays from around the world and working days.

The data is accessible via an API key so we can get the data and use it in our own program with ease.

Conclusion

With these APIs, there’re lots of projects we can do with it for practice. We can even use them ourselves if it provides us with a useful function.

Just because they’re practices apps doesn’t mean we can’t use them if they’re useful.