5 Exciting APIs Developers Should Try

Whether you’re building something for fun or working on a product that’ll bring in revenue, the pure glee of finding out that some functionality you need already exists as an API is the same.

You’re right to be happy, after all, the benefits are clear to see:

• Less time spent on implementing your version of the same feature.
• Using an API cuts down on the size of your software.
• Scaling is easier as you only have to focus on the core features of your product.

The usual progression for a project is for you to first realize that you need a specific functionality and then search for an API to do the job. Since we don’t know what you’d need, though, let’s do things the other way around this time. We’ve compiled a list of excellent APIs that we’d like to show, and it’s up to you to find a way to use them in new and innovative ways in your apps.

Let’s see what the world of APIs has in store for you:

Fixer API — foreign exchange rate data in JSON format

If Forex rates significantly impact your business, then checking current rates, comparing them to your notes to see fluctuations, and trying to predict changes with a calculator won’t cut it. Instead, you can just send an API call to Fixer and get everything in one second.

Fixer can deliver exchange rates for 170 world currencies. Those numbers are updated every hour, but you can check historical data from 1999 to this day. And that’s just the free plan!

Paid versions let you make more API calls, offer better support, update the rates more often and let you analyze currencies on specific dates and time frames.

Even with the free version, you can always know exactly how much a transaction costs by making a request to convert currencies or find out their value.

The API can have a big impact on both companies and individuals. Knowing how to leverage favorable exchange rates is a sign of a healthy firm. As a person, it comes in handy to understand prices in your own currency while abroad.

Sentiment Analysis API — identify negative comments in seconds

The Internet has made it easier than ever to review a product or company, to tell the world what your experience has been like. Everyone stands to benefit from this development, too. Customers get to hear unbiased opinions before spending money, and companies get more feedback and ideas on how to improve.

The downside is that now it’s easier than ever to suffer from information overload. If you’re looking at hundreds of reviews or comments every day or decide to conduct a study of a few thousand opinions, it’s easy to get lost in all that data.

The Sentiment Analysis API is of massive help in automating at least part of the process. It does something that’s both very useful and easy to understand: it assigns a score to an analyzed piece of text. The score is between -1 and 1, and the closer it is to the lower end, the more negative the opinion, 0 being pure neutral and 1 being very positive.

This is how it works: in a review or comment, certain keywords have positive or negative connotations. Each one receives a score in the [-1; 1] range. The overall score of the text is the average of those scores.

Then there’s also the ratio. To get that, the API adds the positive scores and the negative scores and compares them. For example, if you have a total negative score of -5 and a total positive score of 2.5, the ratio will be -0.667 (or 2:1).

The cool thing about this API is that you can set what it defines as positive or negative. By default, anything under -0.05 is negative, and anything over 0.05 is positive, but you can twiddle with these limits as you see fit.

Of course, customer reviews still need a human eye and mind to analyze them, but the Sentiment Analysis API can help you speed up the process and draw clear conclusions.

WordsAPI — Dictionary, thesaurus, and beyond

Finding the right words isn’t always easy. That goes double if you’re holding a presentation, writing a book, or even an article. The English language is beautiful, but we rarely stray from the mundane parts of the vocabulary.

WordsAPI was made to rectify that, helping with both writing and reading. Using it is fairly simple: you type in a word, and you get loads of information about it.

You use parameters to choose some specific info or just let it pull everything, and you’ll get:

• Definitions;
• Synonyms;
• Antonyms;
• Examples of sentences with the word;
• Rhymes;
• Use frequency;
• Hypernyms;
• Hyponyms;
• Holonyms;
• Meronyms;
• Words that the original word is an example of;
• Words that are examples of the original word;
• Similar words that aren’t actual synonyms;
• Words that are implied by the original word;
• Words to which the original word is relevant.

That’s a long list, and it doesn’t even contain all the fields that WordsAPI can return. If you want to spruce up the way you communicate, you’ll have plenty of options.

Of course, a considerable part of the appeal of APIs is the fact that you can integrate them into larger scripts. Having a dictionary + thesaurus combo on hand is a great boon if you’re interested in building a software product that helps others improve their grasp of the English language. Another interesting idea would be word games, for example, one that requires the player to give a rhyme, a synonym, or spell the word, much like Scrabble.

APOD — NASA would like to show you a cool picture

NASA has a whole slew of APIs open to the public. Maybe the most interesting, though, is the Astronomy Picture of the Day API, at least for the average person. If the name isn’t clear enough, APOD is an API that sends a photo (or several) of space, together with an explanation of what’s in the image and some other helpful info.

NASA has a web page dedicated to the Astronomy Picture of the Day that you can access straight from the browser, and the API does much of the same but in JSON format.

One of the cool things about APOD, besides the breathtaking pictures, is that an astronomer writes the explanation, so you’re getting real information from a professional.

Some of the images featured in the API care copyrighted, so you can’t just build something on top of the API and sell it, but we’d like to ask you one thing: is there ever a situation that wouldn’t be improved by a cool space picture? Because if there is, we haven’t yet found it.

WebScrapingAPI — Next level data extraction

We couldn’t help but talk about our API, especially since it can pair so wonderfully with Sentiment Analysis API and WordsAPI.

WebScrapingAPI is a REST API that extracts the HTML code from any web page. It does that by using a large proxy pool that includes both datacenter and residential IPs, a headless browser that renders javascript, and plenty of automated anti-blocking features.

We mentioned the previous APIs because they’re used to process information, while WebScrapingAPI is used to gather information. Here’s an example of how you can use our scraping tool and the Sentiment Analysis API in tandem:

1. You identify a web page where people leave reviews for your products (or for a competitor);
2. You set up WebScrapingAPI to scrape the page once every day and send the data to the Sentiment Analysis API.
3. That API checks how positive or negative the reviews are and then sends the results to you.
4. You automatically get a clear and up-to-date report on how people perceive your product and can quickly check for yourself any unusual comment.

Internet data can be invaluable to the people who know how to use it, and we’ve created WebScrapingAPI to help those people gather it more easily.

If you’re interested in trying out WebScrapingAPI, we’re offering you for free 1000 API calls to test the API out, match it with others, find new ways to use the data, and just have a jolly time.