Sometimes our clients come to us with a request to have data from another website shown on their website. Alternatively, they may want something (like data or information) from their site sent to another website. We can do this with APIs, or, Application Programming Interfaces.
Two of the most common types of API requests our development team works with at Engage are a GET Request, or a POST Request.
GET Request
Some APIs just hold information that you want, and you can submit a request for that information, and they give it to you. This is called a GET request because you are GETting information from their API. For example, displaying a Twitter social feed on your homepage.
POST Request
Some APIs allow you to make changes to the site in question. This is called a POST request. Using Twitter as an example again, we use Twitter’s API to post our own tweets on their platform from our website. A useful scenario using this request could be creating a blog post and then automatically creating a post on Twitter with the link to that post when it is published. Another use case of a POST request at Engage was with a client’s Campaign Monitor integration. When the client created a new WordPress post and clicked the publish button, that post would get sent in newsletter-form to their mail client to be pushed out to their subscribers.
We made this chart to help our team understand the different levels of difficulty for common APIs that we’ve encountered. Because Engage loves metaphors, we like to rank our APIs as if they were ranked as Chipotle salsas; a “spicy” API will present much more uncertainty and technical challenge than a mild one. Sometimes the difficulty comes from making initial connections to the API. But other times it just comes down to poor documentation or the way they provide the data is unorganized and difficult to get what we want out of their API.
Mild:
Engage’s dev team has worked with this API many times in the past, it has good documentation, and it is easy to use. Some examples of Mild APIs include Twitter, Mailchimp and Stripe.
Medium:
Engage’s dev team may have some experience with these, but have hit some roadblocks that take some time to resolve and build upon including outages, poor documentation, or unforeseen issues. Some examples of medium spice APIs include Facebook, Salesforce and PayPal.
Spicy:
These APIs are HOT, HOT, HOT! But Engage can handle the heat. This does mean that there are a lot of extra roadblocks in the way, however. For example, we may need to get an Application approved by the company who made the API first, and it could take weeks or months for someone on their team to review and approve. Or the API may not provide the information we are looking to receive. Some examples of spicy APIs include LinkedIn, Instagram and Box.
As we continue working with different APIs this chart will grow, allowing us to become better versed on expectations for the build, have a better idea of the timeline, understand if it is cost-effective, and know how many resources we should put into it.
