Chapter 11: Other Major APIs

Overview

This chapter seeks to introduce a few of the other APIs out there that have garnered some attention as of late. The coverage of each API is brief, but should allow you to hit the ground running if you decide to use any of these APIs in one of your projects. The three APIs introduced are the National Weather Service (NWS), which provides up-to-date weather information for locations (specified by longitude and latitude) within the U.S. only; Flickr, which is a photo publishing community site that allows you to share your photos with friends, with easy components to plug into blogs or other web spaces; and Del.icio.us (Delicious), which is a social bookmark manager that allows you to share your bookmarks with friends and people with similar interests, or pretty much everyone.

Overall, the goals of this chapter are as follows:

• Introduce you to a few different APIs with drastically different interface models

• Provide working code examples to get you up and running with three different APIs

• Start you thinking about different interface methods that could be used to develop your own API (this is discussed further in the next chapter)