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APIs are everywhere on the Internet, and knowing how to interact with them is an important skill for the modern web developer. Being able to access and interact with third-party data can take your apps to the next level in lots of cool ways!
In this article, we’re going to take a look at some of the best APIs that developers can access and how APILayer makes it easy to do so.
We created this article in partnership with APILayer. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.
What’s an API?
API stands for application programming interface, and it can describe anything that allows two programs to communicate with each other. For example, methods such as document.insertNode aren’t actually part of JavaScript: they’re a part of the DOM API that allows your program to communicate with the DOM.
Web APIs allow your code to communicate and interact with websites and online services in a controlled way. In most cases, this is done by sending a request that returns some data, which is almost always in JSON format. This data can then be used in your code.
Many APIs also allow you to offload some of the workload from your application to an external service. For example, if you wanted to translate a document, you could avoid having to write all the code for doing this this and instead use an API.
APILayer
APILayer is a curated API marketplace. Every API is carefully selected by APILayer’s team of developers to ensure that it’s secure and stable, with the ability to scale as your site grows. All the APIs have a free plan, and you don’t need to hand over any payment details to get started. APILayer currently features almost 100 APIs, with more being added all the time. These APIs cover a range of categories, from finance to food, as well as featuring a number of web development tools such as image processing and spell checking.
Each API has different payment tiers, starting from free and increasing in price depending on you how many…
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