Continuing on from webhooks of the last meetup we covered APIs in this December’s meetup before breaking into chatting about setting up a developer environment after trying to go through setting up GRPC on a XAMPP VM (unsuccessfully 😢)
Presentation notes
- APIs
- API: Application Programmable Interface
- Allowing you to connect to systems via an official and standard way provided by the system provider
- Authorization / Authentication via
- Version managers
- Allows you to switch between supported versions of libraries if your other projects use a different version
- PHP: php-version
- Ruby: rbenv, rvm
- Node: nvm
- Python: pyenv
- Be wary as you need to play by the rules of the provider
- Rate limits on the API: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/overview/#rate-limiting
- Limited number of uses/tokens: https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/policy.html
- May need to set up privacy policy to enable for public use https://developers.facebook.com/policy/
- May need to be approved before public use https://developers.intercom.com/building-apps/docs/review-publish-your-app
- May need to pay for extra access / privileges
- Exploring APIs
- Read the docs: Stripe API docs
- API explorers: Google
- API / REST clients e.g. Postman / Insomnia
- Possibly find existing API collections you can import and use at Zerocode API collections
- My own post about APIs and API/REST Clients that go into a bit more detail about them
- Creating your own APIs
- If a system does not have an API you could create one but remember to play way and not abuse their systems
- Tools to parse webpages
- Python: Beautiful Soup
- Node: Cheerio, jsdom
- Automation tools
- Online services
The Wheat Field 