Working with APIs

A simple question: How do you work with APIs? Well you don’t. There is almost no cooperation on the APIs end and you will exclusively have to work around the APIs lack of documentation and functionality. So with that in mind: How do you work against the API to actually get the information that apps crave?

1. Research possible APIs

There’s a solid chance you know exactly what API you want already. If you want to access Twitter’s data, there is a 100% chance that you’ll be utilizing the Twitter API. If you information is a bit more fungible, you can have the option of several different APIs. For instance: a book database. There are several library APIs that have a huge database of books, but each of their JSON responses are of course structured differently. On top of that, the information provided in a response may not give the app the information necessary for the functionality of the app. For instance in the Open Library API, you cannot search for a list of books and then pick a specific book due to the search response not returning a specific book identifier. You would have to do a new fetch request. If you draw out the functionality and work flow of your app well, you should be able to view the APIs JSON response and determine if the API is structured in a way as to be useful foryour app.

2. Read the documentation