What is API or Application Programming Interface?
API is a set of functions, procedures, methods or classes which can be used by external programs. A developer can refer to the API documentation of the application and develop applications which can run from different computers or websites.
Now you can find that most of the popular portals or services like Digg, Twitter, etc offers this interface so that the service can be used more widely. Using these API, we can develop modules or plugins for different CMS like Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, etc. I recently released a plugin for Wordpress using the Twitter API and other one from Google translate. In this post I am trying to provide some information related to the services which provide API functionality.
Digg API
Digg API needs an application key The CGI argument application is required for all Digg API requests. The value of the appkey argument is up to you, within the constraints described below. Digg does not issue or authenticate appkeys at this time. It is used only for statistical purposes. You can find more information related to the Digg API usage here. Digg API can be used with Flash, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Javascript and .NET.
Flickr API
Flickr is a service where you can share your photos with your friends by uploading your favourite pictures. Pictures are organized and tagged well. There are hundreds of millions of photos and videos. There are different groups that helps in sharing like minded people and their interests. You can join or create groups and organize your pictures and Videos. Flickr stands for Sharing, Organizing and exploring.
Flickr offers Flickr API for developers to create applications. You need an API Key to use this service which can be obtained by registering for this service. API for Flickr includes for uploading photos, replacing photos. The request formats are REST, XML-RPC, SOAP and response formats are REST, XML-RPC, JSON, PHP and SOAP. API kits are available in C, Coldfusion, cUrl, Delphi, Java, PHP, perl, PHP5, python, Ruby and realbasic.
Google Translate API
Google Translation API lets you create translation of the content of any website to different International Languages. This is an excellent service and is very useful to create multi-lingual websites in a fly. I have written a Translation Plugin for Wordpress. We can use languages like PHP, Javascript etc to create applications using this API
There are many other API’s available like Google Search API, Reuters API, Panoramia API, Twitter API and many more to add to this list. If you know about any interesting API’s please let me know.
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