My app is a Personal Assistant who's main job is to redirect the user to something that complies with his/her wishes. I realize, for example that AllRecipies.com has no API. My question is that can I, say open the browser app with the url as
http://allrecipes.com/search/results/?wt=QUERY>&sort=re.
Is this considered as using their API? Not just AllRecipies, but numerous other such services. If I am using this method, then do I have to request API key, etc? I am not retrieving anything. I am simply redirecting the user to their page with the query pre-written. Does this require all the licensing fees, API Key, etc?
Do I have to agree to this fees(If they ask), Request API Key, etc?
With the particular URL in question, it is simply an HTML web server URL, rather than a web API, as such. You can still get data out of it, but you'd have to parse the HTML yourself to extract what you want from the HTML response.
They may have an API that you can use to access data more directly as JSON, XML, etc, but you'll have to look into that yourself. And you will possibly require an API key to access it. But perhaps not, if it's publicly available and they don't care how many calls they get to it by anonymous users.
You may find this resource useful. It contains a lot of open APIs and code snippets to access them: http://www.programmableweb.com/
If you are simply trying to hit a URL or directing a user to this particular URL which you already know and is static meaning you always hit the same url without change in parameters, then this is not considered an API call and will not be requiring any API key.
However, if they have some APIs exposed, you will need to go through their documentation and using this API most likely requires the use of an API key(alhough this might not be true always). Usually, most platforms have a bunch of APIs available for different scenarios and these are called based on user specific parameters and requirements.
Related
My aim is to select some text from a web page, start a google chrome extension and give the text to a google cloud api (Natural Language API) in my case.
I want to do some sentimental analysis and then get back the result to mark/ highlight positive sentences in green and negative ones in red.
I am new to this and do not know how to start.
The extension consists of manifest, popup etc. How should I call an API from there that does Natural Language Processing?
Should I create a Google Cloud Application with an API_KEY to call? In that case I would have to upload my credentials right?
Sorry sounds a bit confusing I know but I just don't know how I can bring this 2 things together an would be more than happy about any help
The best way to authenticate your app will depend on the specific needs and use cases of your application. You can see an overview of all the different methods here.
If you are not planning on identifying users nor on using a back end server that handles authenticating (as I assume to be your case), the best option would indeed be to use API keys. They do not identify the user, but are enough for the Natural Language APIs.
To do this you will need to create an API key for the services you want and add the necessary restrictions to make the key as secure as possible. Detailed instructions on how to do this and how to use the key in a url can be found here.
The API call could be made from within the Chrome extension with any JavaScript method capable of performing POST requests. For example using XMLHttpRequest or the Fetch API. You can find an example of the parameters that need to be included in the request here.
You may run into CORS issues when making the request directly from the extension. I recommend reading this answer, where a couple of workarounds for these issues are suggested.
Basically, I'm looking for the absolute simplest way to add an email (which is effectively a Customer object with no other parameters) to my list of Customers. The use-case is a jQuery-based pop-up email collector that I'm writing because I'm not happy with/don't want to pay for more established solutions.
Everything is working correctly, except I'm stuck on how exactly to authenticate to my Shopify store. Via Javascript I can only perform a few API calls, none of which I need. There are also very complex solutions for creating full-fledged apps for Shopify which are able to do everything, but I think that's overkill for this one API request I need to make.
I know that all I need to do is make a POST request once authenticated per these instructions. What is the best way to do this?
If you want to create user from jQuery you can generate using AJAX POST call in appropriate URL generated using Private App, but be careful before placing authorization details in front end since it will be visible and any one can misuse it.
The better way is to create user using HTTP Post call from some server side language like JAVA or PhP or some language.
I have a website that revolves around transactions between two users. Each user needs to agree to the same terms. If I want an API so other websites can implement this into their own website, then I want to make sure that the other websites cannot mess with the process by including more fields in between or things that are irrelevant to my application. Is this possible?
If I was to implement such a thing, I would allow other websites to use tokens/URLs/widgets that would link them to my website. So, for example, website X wants to use my service to agree user A and B on the same terms. Their page will have an embedded form/frame which would be generated from my website and user B will also receive an email with link to my website's page (or a page of website X with a form/frame generated from my server).
Consider how different sites use eBay to enable users to pay. You buy everything on the site but when you are paying, either you are taken to ebay page and come back after payment, or the website has a small form/frame that is directly linked to ebay.
But this is my solution, one way of doing it. Hope this helps.
It depends on how your API is implemented. It takes considerably more work, thought, and engineering to build an API that can literally take any kind of data or to build an API that can take additional, named, key/value pairs as fields.
If you have implemented your API in this manner, then it's quite possible that users of this API could use it to extend functionality or build something slightly different by passing in additional data.
However, if your API is built to where specific values must be passed and these fields are required, then it becomes much more difficult for your API to be used in a manner that differs from what you originally intended.
For example, Google has many different API's for different purposes, and each API has a very specific number of required parameters that a developer must use in order to make a successful HTTP request. While the goal of these API's are to allow developers to extend functionality, they do allow access to only very specific pieces of data.
Lastly, you can use authentication to prevent unauthorized access to your API. The specific implementation details depend largely on the platform you're working with as well as how the API will be used. For instance, if users must login to use services provided by your API, then a form of OAuth may suffice. However, if other servers will consume your API, then the authorization will have to take place in the HTTP headers.
For more information on API best practices, see 7 Rules of Thumb When You Build an API, and a slideshow from a Google Engineer titled How to Design a Good API and Why That Matters.
Is there any way to programatically access, through the Twitter API or otherwise, the data from the list of handles from the similar_to page? (e.g. https://twitter.com/#!/similar_to/aplusk).
Scraping as always is least desirable with dynamic javascript sites like Twitter.
It's there, it's just currently undocumented:
https://api.twitter.com/1/users/recommendations.json?user_id=783214
Looking at the request, these parameters are supported:
connections: Includes extended network connections in the data structure. For example, connections=true
limit: Limit the number of entries. For example, limit=3
user_id: The user ID to get recommendations for. For example, user_id=783214
Twitter Web options:
cursor: Unclear. I'd assume this removes the selection cursor in Twitter Web. For example, cursor=-1
display_location: The location to display the results (for Twitter Web). For example, display_location=st-view-all-stream
pc: Unclear. I'd assume this is just user-agent checking. For example, pc=true
It doesn't require authentication to hit against. I'm not sure if this is rate-limited, because I can't find any further information at the time of this writing.
While no documentation has been given by Twitter on this API, it's in current use by Twitter Web and Twitter Mobile for iOS, and it otherwise appears to be production-ready. Obviously, no guarantees can be had until Twitter officially releases it.
Good luck!
There's also a thing you may remember since theres no API 1.0 you cannot make requests from javascript, jquery, ajax or client languages to json. You can only make requests just with server languages like PHP to json in API 1.1.
But let's think that you want to make your application more dynamic, if we cannot make request to twitter directly, the solution is that you have to use PHP auth with Twitter and then in your own page (with the response of the php page) make the Javascript, ajax, and you can make it dynamic like API 1.0.
my own application Twitter API
My idea is to treat URI's in my rest api as a unique resource, except in the context of the client's location, which is stored in a cookie. Are there any downsides to this approach?
From a philosophical perspective, it's not really REST if you don't uniquely identify the resource via URL (at least, per my reading of Fielding).
From a practical perspective -- and this is based on experience -- you're in for a world of pain if you require web service calls to use cookies. Primarily because it's a piece of information that has to be managed on a different code path, making your client-side code more complex. You'll also run into issues with domain and proxies (particularly if you share the cookie between the service and a traditional web-app), and it isn't portable between clients.
If you're looking to generate different content based on location, why not use a geolocation service?
Edit: why not make location part of the request URL? You can still use a cookie to store this information, and retrieve it using JavaScript. This would leave your service interface clean, and allow you to easily use the service from other clients.
As an API, you should aim at making ease of use for the client programmer a high priority. In many libraries that support HTTP, putting cookies into the HTTP request is more difficult than putting, say, a query parameter into the URL.
I'd be concerned about caching. Do one request with the user at location A, it gets cached, user moves to B and makes the request again, gets location A version of the request.