Summary

This chapter introduced Web APIs, and discussed the differences between APIs and feeds. At this point you should understand the following:

• The basics of interacting with Web APIs using REST and SOAP

• How to generate web service requests both manually and by utilizing a number of tools that can help generate dynamic requests

• How to handle and parse the server responses utilizing SimpleXML or MiniXML

The next few chapters take an in-depth look at several of the most popular and most useful APIs on the Web today. The knowledge and familiarity gained in this chapter should prove useful when examining that code.