I'm currently studying computing and it tackles about API. I keep reading this term 'APIs provide an interface for communicating software' but i'm not really sure what is an interface to API? May i ask for your help to explain it?
Not sure if i get your question right, but let me have a try:
So basically a simple architecture of building for example an app is splitting it up in front- and backend. For example, in a ToDo-List app there is a server-side software which manages all data and we have a Mobile App which shows the data to the user. The backend is an "abstract" program. I mean with that that you can't click buttons or something else. So, when you want to create a task in your frontend app you have to tell the backend (for example written in Java or Python) that you want to make this. For this you can use an API.
This is basically an Call of an Website. The backend recognizes is and loads data out of an database, manages it and displays it for example in JSON Format. This format is send to the website.
Look here: https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1
The app now is able to automatically get this data and manages it.
Obviously real APIs are much more complex. For example you have to authenticate, you can hand over parameters and so on. You have POST, GET, DELETE Methods.
But this is simply the basic concept of an API.
Look here to know how to create an API (for example in Java): https://spring.io/guides/gs/rest-service/
Look here to know how for example an Mobile App consumes the API (in JavaScript): https://www.taniarascia.com/how-to-connect-to-an-api-with-javascript/
I hope i could help you :)
Best regards
Sebastian
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Around a year ago I made an iOS application that finds restaurants near your location of any type and displays information about them. I made a web service call using the FourSquare api to get all the data which was returned in json format and then I parsed it and displayed the information on the UI of the app. Now I want to make an android application using Xamarin.Android since I am learning working with Xamarin studios and C#. When I make a Xamarin.Android application and go to packages then add packages I see there is a Foursquare api package that has a .NET wrapper around it. Here is the website url:
https://www.nuget.org/packages/Foursquare.Api/
So my question is how does this work? Does adding this package mean I don't have to make a web serivce call anymore, instead all the data is stored inside this package and I just have to get all the data the same way I get information from a local database? What are the advantages of using this package instead of just making a web service call to Foursquare?
Think of it this way:
This Foursquare API is simply a .NET wrapper of the web service that you want to use. Thus, somebody has gone ahead and done all of the hard work for you so you can simply consume the returned data in your applications.
What does this mean for you?
Well it means that you don't have to write any REST consumption code and you can focus more on the actual application and any business logic that you need to implement based on the Foursquare objects.
To not confuse any further, this data would come the same way as if you wrote your own web service to access the data from the Foursquare API endpoint.
Advantages:
Already written for you
You don't need to know your way around their REST API
Usually follows best practices per language so it's easy to consume (Objects created, methods, etc)
Disadvantages:
REST endpoint might be updated and not reflect in the package until it's updated
Any bugs/issues in the framework can be hard to workaround if the project is not open source
Could be a lack of documentation on how to use the wrapper
My single page app is hosted on Google's cloudstore. I love that I don't have to worry about a server. The app is, naturally, javascript heavy.
Now I would like to add a feature where users can store some data, generate a link to be shared with others and retrieve stored data. Think of a pastebin where some snippet of text is saved and a unique link is generated to be shared with others.
In fact, if it helps, think of this as my attempt to create a pastebin without having to setup a server.
It looks like Google's cloud datastore nosql solution is what I want. Given a key, it will return a snippet of text. However, all the examples on the documentation page imply that I have to setup a back end service using python, node, etc.
Questions:
Can't I just read and write from a web page, perhaps using ajax style http call (since I need to get and put text snippets once data has already been loaded)? I believe I can take care of cross-origin issues by changing some configs in the cloudstore static website server.
Obviously I don't want to serve any encryption keys from the web page. I'm hoping that since my site is served from Google as well, I can configure the nosql service handle permissions intelligently for this scenario.
Is there any documentation which shows how to do this correctly?
Google Datastore is not supposed to be used from client side, it's a served side database. You cannot do that w/o having server side code to authenticate, authorize and validate db related requests.
But there're an alternative. Firebase is a ready to use backend for client side applications, including Javascript apps. It's a separate project, that belongs to Google but not (yet?) part of Google Cloud. Take a look - https://www.firebase.com/
Although the API Rest is still beta, it is possible now to connect from a web client or anything RESTful capabilities. https://cloud.google.com/datastore/reference/rest/
I am tasked to build a web application for data entry. Users will be able to log in and enter some data via browser. The data will be stored in Parse data tables. The web app should be easy and quick to build.
Is Parse able to host my HTMLs? I can program with JavaScript, but wonder which API I should use, JavaScript, REST or Cloud api? Any limitation as to my requirements? Which is the quickest way?
Thanks!
Yes parse can hold your HTML and you can host your site on it, you can read more about it here.
If you are building a web app I would use the JavaScript sdk.
Parse has a lot of documentation and its actually really good. This here would be a good place to start.
Hope this helps!
I am in the middle of building a PhoneGap (Cordova) app which I would like to be able to talk to a Django site of mine. The steps needed to get the app working are:
Authenticate the user (stay logged-in across app restarts) (e.g. get session cookie from Django for communication with the service - where to store?). Note: The Django endpoint uses https.
When app receives push notification load some data from my django site.
Make selection on data and submit response back to my django site (will need the csrf token?)
I was able to sort out the push notifications but now I am wondering which solution would work best for the communication with Django.
As I understand there are two possible approaches:
Either to implement a REST service with something like tastypie or
try to setup the communication via ajax (e.g. jQuery)
At the moment I am thinking that going simply ajax might be the best approach since the app is fairly small and there are no additional requirement for a REST API.
It would be great if anyone could give me any pointers on how to solve this or share some experiece / code. Especially the steps of the authentication process are unclear to me.
I am not sure if this is still an open question but it is sure an interesting one.
I would strongly suggest on using the django-tastypie and you could start by using the docs which are indeed a great point of reference.
My experience until now has shown that I should always start by making my api clear(and rest) than choosing an easier faster solution(e.g. ajax) because if your app is a successful one, frameworks like tastypie help you scale.
The authentication process is pretty straightforward if you choose the basic one.
You just ask for the user credentials and there are many clients implementing the client side basic auth.
Fortunately, tastypie supports more than this. For example, the api authentication and you could read more here.
If you need anything else, please let me know.
Regards,
Michael.
My app, in one of its parts, should reproduce the same behaviour as a web page, where you can find a section with a table of Twitter posts, I guess they are a user's timeline. I took a look at Twitter api's and I found a call which could return it, but, If I got it right, you are supposed to be authenticated with that user credentials. Is there a way to achieve it without being that user (thus without using that user's credentials)? If not we have to assume that web plugins have more flexibility than queries which return xml, or json? Which kind of approach fits best, considering the app needs to support iOS from 4.3 to 6.x? Does Twitter+Oauth provide more flexibility than direct Twitter api calls?
Hm, if you are looking to just display user's feed you can do it as simple as:
https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=reMakeIn&count=200
Where you change the screen_name to the desired user that you want to show the feeds for.
No need what so ever to use authentication for this.
Not sure if this is what you want to achieve, but I use this approach to show random user's tweet feed.