APIs (or Application Programming Interfaces) are something you may use to retrieve some information into your script or application and can be used at any point in an application. Modern-day applications are built around third-party APIs for various services. Although you may go create an API yourself, the process can be time and resource-consuming. Open(Public) APIs are amazing as they allow any third-party developers to integrate into your website, software application, or mobile apps.
Why Use APIs?
The software revolution has impulsively exploded, and the fastest-growing segment to date has shifted towards APIs. The dramatic decrease in an essential total cost of ownership of adopting software is a by-product of APIs, which have not only solved scaling challenges but has taken away the burden of setting up and managing local hardware. Businesses now focus on more important things with APIs working in their place as the IT operations have become less of a burden. Almost 73% of the companies have a portion of their computing infrastructure in the cloud or at least one of their applications. The API boom has made developers an in-demand and valuable resource with time. Developers nowadays value and prefer businesses that help diminish the nuisances.
How To Get Started With APIs?
Access to API is integral to their application as developers look to integrate products deeply into their own applications. Including technical documentation, examples, and sandbox environments to test the API are the best practices for the API integration process. APIs are now a critical part of a developer’s strategy to build on a large scale. There is no concept these days as to why a business might waste precious resources like time and money to do something in-house that can be done much better somewhere else.
This approach not only allows developers to focus on their efforts but pivot on building an evolving product. Thanks to this great shift in technology use, complex services can now be simplified as code pieces.
Modern-day business giants like Uber, Airbnb, PayPal, etc., use third-party API in their applications’ background. These companies are built on the backs of scalable developer services that allow them to summate everything from locations and payments to SMS and email. The developers behind these API-first companies (like PayPal or Stripe) where the API is the product are simultaneously building to become sustainable, unconventional, and enormous organizations. API’s continuous and regular usage benefits both The increased API usage has benefits for both those operating them in their business and the developers.
As the sturdy environment continues to grow around the API ripple, the best way to have a business is not by developing everything internally but by integrating third-party API services with other software houses. Google’s Firebase is a great example of API use cases where the development community can integrate the Firebase API into their workflows and build up from there. Other than that, we have also listed down some useful API services below:
SkyScanner - Flight Search
Like Google Flights, Skyscanner is a search aggregator engine that provides travel data for flights, hotels, car rentals, and more. With Skyscanner aggregating your travel and flight data, you don’t have to go for multiple sites yourself to check each individual’s flight price and/or plan. Its API allows you to access this metasearch travel data to avail the cheapest quotes on selected flight dates, browse flight routes, and even more.
OpenWeather - Weather forecasts
Provision of weather data, including forecasts and historical data, is done through an online service called OpenWeatherMap. Their API provides access to weather maps and forecasts for numerous cities across the world.
Open Weather Map API endpoints are:
- Current Weather Data: These kinds of requests can get you weather data in any location on the earth from more than 40,000 weather stations.
- Daily Forecast Weather Data: All-weather forecast data for 14 days can be obtained in JSON or XML format.
- Search Weather Data: You can search for weather data by city name. Just put the city name or part of it and get the most proper cities globally, e.g., Lon or Lond or London. The more precise the city name you put, the more precise list you will get. To make it more accurate, enter the city’s name or part of it, comma, the two-letter country code, or county’s name. Proper cities in the chosen county will be obtained. The order is important – the first is the city name, then a comma, then the county. Example – Lon, UK or Lon, GB or London, GB or Lon, England. By geographic coordinates.
TheCocktailDB - Beverage database
The Cocktail DB is a world-wide API-based free crowd-sourced database of beverages and cocktails. It is free to use for non-commercial purposes. The API allows you to search for cocktails by:
- Categories
- Glasses-type (for example: flute vs. standard cocktail glass)
- Ingredients
- Alcoholic-type (Alcoholic vs. non-alcoholic)
Deepomatic - Fashion apparel detection
Deepomatic is used to support the detection and location of clothes in images. A developer can recognize the different apparel pieces present in an image by simply sending the image’s URL/base64. Deep learning and machine vision capabilities enable users to identify the bounding boxes that specify each piece of apparel’s exact location provided by the API.
Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) - Crawl internet data at scale
Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) is here as it is our blog, and the value you get from using Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) is distinguishable from the market, which our case studies have shown. Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) is not just a rotating proxy provider for your scraping projects but also an all in one comprehensive platform for developers looking for data. From reliable backconnect proxies to intelligent, easy-to-use Crawling API, a Scraper API with dedicated and generic scrapers, taking screenshots, endless scrolling on headless browsers. Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) also offers cloud data storage solution to store crawled data in different formats, images, JSON, and HTML.
The system is powered by an Artificial Intelligence algorithm that bypasses Cloudflare, akamai blocks, and captchas. Our dedicated technical support team team is always ready to help whenever you need help.
A pay-as-you-go plan is served with no hidden fees for the crawling API, so you only pay for the successful requests. The first 1000 requests are for free, and you will know the exact total cost based on the number of requests you make. The monthly pricing calculator makes calculating your cost quite easy, you only pay per success, and if there is no value to your business, you do not pay.
There are monthly subscriptions; subscriptions range between 99 USD per month to 289 USD per month for the proxy backconnect. The features you get between the different packages allow you to use more proxy pools, geolocations, and more threads on unlimited bandwidth. You can find the pricing for other Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) services mentioned in this post on each product page.
Conclusion
Using APIs can save you time and resources and can even be helpful when scaling. Things are changing now, and businesses don’t want to do everything from scratch and save on costs and useless hassles. APIs are the future of Software as a Service (SaaS) where developers can get everything done through third-party APIs.
