4 ms·
Ask HN – Simple APIs Without Authentication?
I want to teach some kids about REST APIs.
Are there any good / fun / interesting ones which don't require authentication?
I'd love to use Flickr and Twitter - but both require quite a cumbersome setup - I just want to focus on retrieving interesting data and doing something with it.
So far, I've found Google Books and Location, Wikipedia, and the iTunes Store Search.
Have you come across anything which is useful for getting kids interested?
Has to be:
* No authentication needed.
* Well structured output.
* Interesting data.
* Child friendly.
* Current.
* Preferably free (libre and gratis).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- edent 13y agoBased on my blog post at http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/04/wanted-simple-apis-without-authentication/ http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/04/wanted-simple-apis-without-a...
- chrisfarms 13y agoYahoo weather API[1] might be usable. A Text-to-Speech API[2] could be fun for kids I guess. [1] http://developer.yahoo.com/weather/ http://developer.yahoo.com/weather/ [2] http://tts-api.com/ http://tts-api.com/
- edent 13y agoThat's brilliant! Thanks :-)
- palcu 13y agoYou could take a look at the Apigee list https://apigee.com/providers https://apigee.com/providers. The Facebook API also has a simple authentication. Just go to the graph explorer and get your token https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/ https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/.
- edent 13y agoThanks - the goal is to have no authentication whatsoever. I can't guarantee that all the kids are allowed on Facebook - and I want to minimise the amount of "magic numbers" they're exposed to.
- rdegges 13y agoMy company, OpenCNAM (https://opencnam.com/ https://opencnam.com/) provides a caller ID API with a pretty generous free tier. No signup required. You can hit the public API endpoints directly with a GET request, and get back caller ID information for a given phone number. Enjoy!
- edent 13y agoYour HTTPS certificate throws up errors in Firefox.
- stevenspasbo 13y agoReddit's API is really easy to use, not sure if the data is going to be all that interesting or kid friendly, though.
- zackboe 13y agoOpen Weather Map http://openweathermap.org/ http://openweathermap.org/ I believe you can make a handful of requests without including an API key, but the free tier is pretty generous.
- jmathai 13y agoOpenPhoto (now Trovebox) is an open source project [1] with an API you can use without authentication. Something which might be helpful to teach your child is that the API endpoint has a corresponding HTML (visual) representation. For example, the web page at https://current.trovebox.com/photos/list https://current.trovebox.com/photos/list can be viewed in JSON format at https://current.trovebox.com/photos/list.json https://current.trovebox.com/photos/list.json. The response is standard across all APIs [2] and the API itself is well documented[3]. This applies to most pages and we blogged about how we did that for easy discoverability[4]. [1] https://github.com/photo/frontend https://github.com/photo/frontend [2] https://trovebox.com/documentation/api/Envelope https://trovebox.com/documentation/api/Envelope [3] https://trovebox.com/documentation https://trovebox.com/documentation [4] http://blog.trovebox.com/post/11031677122/building-openphoto-entirely-using-our-api http://blog.trovebox.com/post/11031677122/building-openphoto...
- edent 13y agoReally useful, thanks!
- samlevy 13y agoIf you don't mind a UK specific API, there is http://postcodes.io http://postcodes.io. No authentication needed, it uses open data which is a plus, it can be demoed from the home page. It may not be the most interesting for children by itself but you can always hook it up to Google Maps or MapBox. There is also Google's geocoder which can be used without an API key last time I checked and they have pretty good demos. https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/geocoding-simple https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...