7 Rapid API Integration Guides
Here at Hitch, our mission is to help API providers and consumers work closely together. One way of accomplishing this goal has been sharing ideas, recommendations, and tools to help anyone interested in launching an API program focus on the right things from the beginning. We’ve covered very diverse subjects such as how to get internal support so your business becomes API-driven, ensuring that API documentation is not an afterthought but a central point of engagement with your community, and even best practices on API design.
We also pay close attention to emerging API-related technologies and express our opinion whenever we feel we have something to add. This was the case with GraphQL, a query language created by Facebook in 2012 whose purpose is to describe the capabilities and requirements of data models for client-server applications. While we believe there are applications where using GraphQL might make sense, it certainly is not a replacement for REST APIs.
For those looking for rapid API integration, we’ve also worked on a number of guides to help you get started with the most popular APIs in our catalog. Here’s a quick list of some of the guides we’ve published in the last three months:
1 — Instagram
Instagram’s platform is available to third-party developers via its Developer program: the main route for integrating with the platform is the Instagram API, so it’s important to understand it’s capabilities and how to onboard your application if this is something you want to offer to your users.
2 — Slack
The Slack API has multiple mechanisms to send messages to and from Slack, which allow developers to build custom integrations and applications for any Slack team to use. Our Getting Started guide is great tool to understand the Slack API’s foundations and get to work. It also includes a step by step guide to learn how to send messages from third party apps to Slack, and vice versa.
3 — Stripe
Stripe’s API allows organizations to make and accept payments through payment cards, Bitcoin and other methods with little effort and extend their market and customer base through products like Connect and Relay. The barriers to learning about the Stripe API are very low as developers can use the API documentation without registering for a Stripe account.
You can learn the basics of this powerful API with our Getting Started guide, or take a deeper dive into it and learn how to make card payments with the Checkout workflow:
4 — Facebook Graph API
The Facebook Graph API is the access point for the vast majority of integrations available in the Facebook platform, such as the“Post on Facebook” buttons see anywhere on the web.
The first thing you need to do to be able to integrate with this social media channel is become a Facebook developer, which only requires having a Facebook account an registering on their developer site. Once you do this, follow the steps included in this guide to create an app and start making queries:
5— GitHub
This Github guide will help you learn how to control issues for projects programmatically, and how to query them using Github Web API.
Also, with step by step explanations and examples, you’ll be able to create, implement and test webhooks to be notified when a certain event on Github occurs.
6— Twitter
Twitter’s REST APIs provide programmatic access to read and write Twitter data, allowing anyone to create a new tweet, read user profiles and follower datas, amongst other things.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to send tweets, retweet and search for tweets programmatically. Before that, you’ll just need to create an application, and understand the authentication methodology used by Twitter. More here:
7—YouTube
The YouTube Data API helps developers include YouTube features on any website. It includes an API explorer and code samples in Java, Python, and many other languages.
This guide focuses on two basic use cases: searching for videos, and uploading content programmatically. You’ll also be able to query additional video details, like ratings.
Conclusion
Each API is a world in its own, and can have a considerable learning curve (which depends, partially, on how well they are documented). With these rapid API guides our goal is to help those starting out get the gist so they can work on integrations as fast as possible.
We’ll be publishing more advanced guides covering diverse use cases. If you have any ideas on topics you’d like us to write about, or would even like to submit your own guides around things you’ve accomplished with any API, give us a shout.
