If you’re a developer building an app that shows deals and promotions, this list of APIs will be useful for you:

DayWatch - DayWatch’s API provides powerful data access to real-time daily deal and coupons data in USA, Latin America and South East Asia. Search deals per country, location, category and activity. 

BlipADeal Worldwide Deals - allows you to utilise our database of over 6 million daily deals and coupons annually from over 14 countries around the globe. We currently have a presence in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Russia, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom and United States. You can find deals based on free text, keyword, categorisation and location.

8coupons - Local Deals from all the deal & daily deal sites (except LivingSocial & Groupon). Local Deals Galore! What we do: 8coupons collects deals from over 500 sources to bring you only the stuff you care about from your neighborhood restaurants, bars, salons, and stores. 

Sidebuy - Daily deals and coupons aggregator

SmartPeaGrocerySalesAPI - SmartPea API is a RESTful API designed for developers who want to access to hyper-localized grocery deals data. We collect grocery deals information at real time from over 40 national retailers across US.

Sqoot- Our API exposes tens of thousands of monetizable, local daily deals. Deals are categorized and searchable by location, distance, price and more.

Rewards as a Service - Tango Card knows what it takes to deliver a modern Rewards program, and our Rewards as a Service (RaaS) delivery model is helping technology companies with real-time digital delivery, modern rewards that employees love, and zero fees. Our success with companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, Intuit, F5, T-Mobile, Citrix and others testify to our commitment to service enterprise and cloud companies. 

Juengo - Juengo is a rewards point system that can be applied to anything. With Juengo API you can enable rewarding within your applications in seconds and even create your own loyalty system with points. These points can be redeemed from your users with actual products from the Juengo Market (http://www.juengo.market). 

Factual (Monetize) - The Monetize API enables you to access offers that Factual has aggregated from various third party offer originators (currently Groupon, LivingSocial, Yelp, GrubHub and Signpost) and earn money based on conversions.

Groupon - Groupon’s mission is to become the world’s commerce operating system. By connecting buyers and sellers through price and discovery, we have the opportunity to become one of the world’s essential companies, a daily habit for our customers and merchant partners.

Dealsurf - DealSurf gathers the best deals in your city, every single day. We offer deals from hundreds of providers like LivingSocial, kgb Deals, GroupOn and many more. 

LesserThan - LesserThan was started to help consolidate the various top online local deal sites into one, easy to use portal. We specialize in aggregating online coupon deals from sources like Groupon, LivingSocial, CrowdSavings, Tippr and more.

LivingSocial - features deals on the best things to do in your city, including restaurants, spas, travel, and more, with discounts up to 90% off.

Yipit Deals - Search and browse every deal, coupon and discount in your city from from Groupon, LivingSocial, Yelp and 800+ others.

Crowdsavings - Find deals for National Deals restaurants, bars, spas, events and more.

Jack MediaDeal Feeder- The DealFeeder API enables partners to access our deals database of over 10,000 deals per month from over 50 Australian daily deal sites. 

mydealbag - Interested in showing deals on your blog/website or wish to write you very own deal app? You have come to the right place! The MyDealBag API (MDBAPI™) is designed to allow programmers easy access to our deal database.

HotUKDeals - HotUKDeals.com was founded in August 2004 as a place for consumers to freely share deal tips, voucher codes and other consumer information.

Coupz - We are a 50% to 90% off deal aggregator. Meaning we look through all the best discounts, coupons, daily deal sites that are out there and bring you the cream of the crop. All our scouted deals are listed by your local city or any city you wish to visit. 

Popshops - PopShops offers you access to over 20 million product discounts and 15,240 deals and coupons active today. Combining deal and coupons from over 4,000 online retailers we provide you access to the largest online deals and coupons database.

Daily Deal Super Store - Our API and Referral Program gives you the power to make money by referring users to the Daily Deal Superstore system. 

PickADeal - PickADeal provides an API for all deals including instant deals from various websites such as Living Social, Groupon, and Yipit.

EdTuit GeoPerks - Integrate GeoPerks to retrieve membership discounts and rewards (aka “perks”) by geographic location.  This is pretty awesome if you’re building location-based mobile apps or directory listings. Perks are not like uttering daily deals or mobile coupons. Perks are discounts, or rewards that people are eligible for because of their various memberships (alumni orgs, student IDs, museum membership, AAA, etc.)

Discfoo - Providing merchants the ability to increase sales and conversion rates through compelling price and product promotions while reducing risk and unpredictable results.

Adility - The Adility API provides a simple RESTful interface with JSON- and XML-formatted responses to use distribution and submission operations, including offers, advertisers, orders, coupon clips, accounts, and reservations, using authentication to allow both read and write access to the offers database. 

Grab A Great Deal - the easy way to find and share hot deals

GroceryServer - Grocery Server is a next-generation marketing platform that reaches millions of consumers each week. Combining the largest database of hyperlocal retail offers and smart shopping tools with a patented universal shopping list and real-time analytics, Grocery Server integrates with leading food and lifestyle websites, emails and mobile apps to inspire consumers and help them plan their most frequent shopping trip.

mphoria - These APIs allow your application to search for deals near a user’s location.

MerchantCircle - Find businesses, read reviews, get directions & more. View coupons and request free quotes from local merchants

OfferGrid- Now get the Ecommerce content (Products, Offers, Deals etc) you want. This page is a reference for the gridAPI, the most structured Ecommerce API available.  It is a collection of HTTP-based requests that provide access to ever-growing content in OfferGrid, along with other relevant information like cities, categories and subcategories where the products and offers exist. 

CityGrid Offers - The CityGrid Offers API enables developers to create applications that access deals and offers in the CityGrid network. Examples of applications that could use the Offers API include applications that display offers for restaurants in a specified neighborhood, applications that display offers for refrigerators in a given metropolitan area, applications that display free offers only.

OhMyDeal - The API Ohmydeal recovers all local bids grouped in France and soon in several European countries.With more than 4,000 deals a month in the ten largest cities in France

StickyStreet - API-powered loyalty platform

DealZippy - daily deal search engine 

CityDeals - Discount gift cards & gift certificates in your neighborhood on national & local brands. Restaurants, entertainment, spas, movie tickets, and more!

Nextag - Nextag offers publishers easy to use data feeds that help you merchandise our most popular pages and categories: Category Link Lists, Top Search Results, Deals Pages, in addition to seasonal links. 

Cucupons - Committed to offering the best discounts in Guatemala. Cucupons is a company created by young entrepreneurs dedicated to find and bring you the best and biggest deals in different areas of everyday life.

GroupDeal2U - We are a voucher/coupon platform (Malaysia) that offers you the opportunity to purchase amazing deals from 20% to up to 90% discounts on the price of your favorites services and products. We take pride in connecting you to the best offers, from discounts at fancy dining restaurants, hotels and at your favorites beauty, spas and shopping centers, to cheap offers for air tickets, travel accommodation, and last minute travel packages.

Shareee - get coupons information in Japan

Are we missing any API here?  Please let Chris know - chris@mashape.com

We have just released Unirest for node.js.  Unirest is a lightweight HTTP client library also available for PHP, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, Java, .NET, and Windows RT.

After installing and setting up Unirest for node.js, you can make a simple HTTP request like this:

Why use Unirest?

The goal of Unirest is to provide developers a consistent manner of making HTTP request calls regardless of programming language used.  We have open-sourced this library so that the developer community can contribute and help with this goal of polishing the library and to accommodate more languages.

Got some suggestions?  Follow the conversation in Hacker News!

It was great meeting everyone at API World!  We had a whopping turnout of 1000+ developers and delivered tons of tracks.  Next year will be bigger!

Here are a few pictures from the 2-day event - 

The Mashape crew in their “Keep Calm and Use an API” shirts!

Mashape CEO and co-founder Augusto Marietti talking about the Art of Selling APIs 

Transforming the Netflix API slides from Ben Schmaus

Top 10 worst API practices from John Musser

APIWorld hackathon participants!

Hope to see you again next year!

Photo credit: Parse

Parse is a backend-as-a-service (BAAS) platform that lets you focus on building your applications without worrying about server and infrastructure maintenance and complexities.  If you haven’t heard or tried Parse before, I encourage you to try their Quickstart here to get an idea of how the BAAS paradigm works.

This post shows an example of a Mashape API integrated with Parse through Parse Modules.  Parse Modules are libraries that Parse developers import into their app to use certain functionality offered by 3rd-party APIs.  Once your API is turned into a Parse Module, it will be easier for developers to use it in their applications.

There’s a whole tutorial from the Parse documentation that shows how to turn your APIs into Cloud Modules, so we won’t go through those steps.  Instead we will show a finished working code here, that you can use to pattern your Modules after.  (It is however essential to have an understanding of how Cloud Code and Cloud Modules work, so reading them first would be great).

Let’s get started!

This is a very simple representation of how each component interacts with one  another.  (Although we are using HTML and Javascript for our app, you can access the Cloud Code from any language supported by Parse).  For this project, we will integrate the Yoda Speak API to Parse as a Cloud Module.

1.  Application (index.html) initializes the Parse Javascript SDK and calls our Cloud Code “yodaSpeakFunction”:

2. Define the Cloud Code “yodaSpeakFunction” (main.js in the /cloud folder) and initialize/call the Cloud Module “yodaSpeak”:

3. The Cloud Module “yodaSpeak” (yoda-1.0.0.js in the /cloud folder) where the Mashape API is called

Our Parse Cloud Module ‘yoda-1.0.0.js' is now finished! You can drop it in your own Parse Cloud Code and start using it.

What’s next?

There’s a ton more Mashape APIs there to expose as Parse libraries.  Let me know if you’ve turned your API to a Parse Cloud Module so we can gather them here and promote them to other developers! - chris@mashape.com

We had the opportunity to “email” interview Rudolf Osman, CEO of Zazler, to get his insights on the challenges facing developers when rolling out their own APIs, and the trend of APIs in general.  

Zazler is a backend for web and mobile apps that saves developers from having to write server-side code.  It works as a server facilitating database queries between the application’s frontend and its database.

Q: What are the circumstances where developers need to create their own API?
With web APIs the circumstances can vary a lot depending on the purpose of the API. We have experience in retail and logistics sectors where information needs to be exchanged between a warehouse management system and an online store. An API could also be required for developing mobile apps, especially native apps where you cannot do without an API. These examples are not exhaustive - a good API should support application interactions as flexibly as possible to support different scenarios.

Q: What are the challenges facing developers now when rolling their own API?
It’s pretty difficult to figure out the different use cases for an API. The main question is how to design an API to be easy to use on the one hand and general-purpose on the other. This has a lot to do with the data structure and how to present it wisely. Let’s assume you have 1000 users of your API - making a small adjustment that is relevant for 100 customers can easily make the experience much more difficult for the remaining 900. So the biggest challenge is deciding upon the design of an API and providing good developer experience.

Q: How does Zazler address these challenges?
Zazler abstracts the data layer of an API so that data is shared in tables. Thus an API user is provided with a database interface to create custom table queries from the client-side (the syntax is described in Zazler’s documentation site: http://docs.zazler.com). This reduces the developers’ burden of both designing and maintaining APIs as these activities are ‘outsourced’ to API users.
Zazler works as a separate web server configurable with a SQL database, whereafter a URL address is given that is used to make queries to tables. Permissions to specific fields and authentication settings can also be configured separately. You can read more about Zazler’s ‘nuts and bolts’ in our recent blog post: “Democratizing Web APIs” (http://www.zazler.com/?p=151).

Q: In your context, where do you see the trend of APIs going?
APIs supporting real-time streaming of data is an important trend currently. We are also strong believers in linked data, therefore meta-level APIs that will facilitate flexible machine-to-machine communications are definitely something to look forward to. But altogether APIs will become more flexible and exchanging data with a server the way the user wants it will become a must. We like to describe the tools with this paradigm as “responsive data frameworks”. Zazler is a responsive data framework.

If you deal with PDF in your applications, you might find this list useful.

Textibility - Textibility provides a simple, REST API for extracting information from images and documents in a number of formats and generating images and documents from structured data. With a simple, clean HTTP interface and some clever processing we can quickly and easily unlock information captured in photographs and file uploads.

SwissKnifeDocs - This API can convert documents into another document format. You can convert documents into images too , or you can simply fill the “merge fields” inside your .docx or .doc document and convert it into whatever format you want.            

Web Print PDF - his api generates a screenshot in pdf format of any live website. You can use it to print out database outputs or even snapshots of your portfolio for demo purposes.            

Extract text from PDFs - Extract text from PDFs Fast and Easy way to extract any text from a PDF Easily implements data-mining, classification, tagging, indexing, etc.

instant PDF - This API allows generating PDFs using JSON markup. The API accepts HTTP POST requests and returns PDF documents.

HTML to PDF conversion with CSS and Javascript - Converts HTML to PDF with support for CSS and JavaScript. Allows watermarking, merging, scaling to one page and much more.            

asPDF - asPdf provides online API to convert your documents. asPDF is very simple to use, its possible convert the following formats: Documents Word 2003, 2007, 2010 (doc, docx); Documents Excel 2003, 2007, 2010 (xls, xlsx).

RichText2Pdf - The API for converting RichText (rtf) documents to PDF files and Images. The RTF file formats can be converted to pdf, pdfa, png, jpg, tif.           

Excel2Pdf - The API for converting Excel documents to PDF files and Images. These file formats csv, xls, xlsb, xlsx, xlt, xltx can be converted to pdf, pdfa, png, jpg, tif.    

Word2Pdf - he API for converting Word documents to PDF files and Images. These file formats doc, docx, dot, dotx, wpd, wps, wri can be converted to pdf, pdfa, png, jpg, tif.    

PowerPoint2Pdf - The API for converting PowerPoint documents to PDF files. The pot, potm, potx, pps, ppsm, ppsx, ppt, pptm and pptx file formats are supported.            

Web2Pdf - The API for converting web pages to PDF files. Fully supports HTML and CSS tags, including page breaks, JavaScript and other html elements.            

Pdf2Image - The API for saving PDF pages to Image files. PDF pages can be extracted to jpg, png or tiff images.

Potrivit Beautiful PDF invoices - Potrivit is an online billing application that lets you design your own bills through an online interface.  

Templatecloud - This API connects you to the Templacecloud.com platform      

Actual Reports - Need to create PDF and HTML documents in your software? Tired of endless output customization request from your users? Looking for an easy and fast solution to your problems? With Actual Reports platform your users can easily create and manage different document templates with an easy-to-use browser based document editor

edocr - Upload docs/pdfs 4 lead generation. Export leads 2 CRM/email marketing 4 lead nurturing.            

Poster Printing - This API provides poster printing services for developers. It enables you to price and order commercially printed posters in different sizes, paper, lamination and mounting from within your web and mobile applications.              

websequencediagrams - The web’s #1 UML sequence diagram tool, saving you time since 2007.            

pdfcrowd - The Pdfcrowd online API is a professional solution that lets you create PDF from web pages and raw HTML code in your applications.

Aspose.Pdf for Cloud - Aspose.Pdf for Cloud is a REST API for creating and editing PDF files. It can also be used to convert PDF files to different formats like DOC, HTML, XPS, TIFF and many more. Aspose.Pdf for Cloud gives you control: create PDFs from scratch or from HTML, XML, template, database, XPS or an image. Render PDFs to image formats such as JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF and many others.

DocRaptor - DocRaptor is a simple HTML to PDF and XLS API. 

Libraries/SDKs

PDF API for .NET - Spire.PDF for .NET is a professional .NET PDF component which enables you to generate, read, edit and manipulate PDF documents in C#, VB.NET.

BCL easyPDF SDK - BCL easyPDF SDK allows development of robust and multi-threaded PDF server and desktop applications.

Foxit PDF SDK - Foxit PDF SDKs enable developers and device manufacturers to leverage Foxit’s award winning PDF library SDK in their applications and devices. The SDKs allow developers to incorporate powerful PDF technology to view, search, and annotate PDF documents and forms

iText - iText is a PDF library that allows you to CREATE, ADAPT, INSPECT and MAINTAIN documents in the Portable Document Format (PDF)

PDF24 Javascript PDF API - PDF24.org provides a FREE PDF generation service to create PDF files. This Javascript API is an interface to this service. The API has been developed for blogs, forums, wiki systems and other article-based internet software to create PDF files in an easy way. 

Apache PDFBox - The Apache PDFBox™ library is an open source Java tool for working with PDF documents. This project allows creation of new PDF documents, manipulation of existing documents and the ability to extract content from documents.

PDF Forms API (Drupal) - This module primarily focuses on existing PDF forms, not on generation.

Adobe PDF Library - The Adobe PDF Library (APDFL) software development kit (SDK) is a low-level PDF library that contains a powerful set of C/C++, Java, and .NET APIs.

PDF-XChange Drivers - PDF-XChange Drivers API 2012 provides Developers with a comprehensive set of Virtual Drivers to generate Adobe^® compatible PDF files from their software applications using our best selling PDF-XChange print drivers for Windows XP & Later (32/64 bit). 

iTextSharp - Text is a PDF library that allows you to CREATE, ADAPT, INSPECT and MAINTAIN documents in the Portable Document Format (PDF)

Report.NET - Report.NET is a powerful library that will help you to generate PDF documents in a simple and flexible manner.

PDFsharp - PDFsharp is the Open Source library that easily creates PDF documents from any .NET language.
The same drawing routines can be used to create PDF documents, draw on the screen, or send output to any printer.

SharpPDF - SharpPDF is a C# library that implements different objects for the creation of PDF documents with few steps.

PDFjet - The base PDF library is available under a business friendly BSD style license.

ASP.NET FO PDF Report Server Control- FO PDF is similar to ASP.NET Server Controls, written in C#.It takes DataTable and few other params to generate the XSL FO and renders a DataGrid like PDF Report using NFOP (Apache FOP Port in J#) PDF Formatter.More tags to generate XSL FO will be added.

PDF Clown - PDF Clown is a C# 2.0 library for reading, manipulating and writing PDF files, with multiple abstraction layers to satisfy different programming styles: from the lower level (PDF object model) to the higher (PDF document structure and content streaming).

PDFCreator - Create PDF files from within any Windows program

pdfcreator - The free PDF converter tool

HTML to PDF - HTML to PDF conversion using GUI or command line batch files. Requires ABCpdf .NET for HTML parsing and PDF processing.

PDFNet SDK - Using the PDFNet PDF library, developers can create powerful PDF solutions that can convert, generate, manipulate, optimize, print, view, and markup PDF documents without any third-party software dependencies.

ziText - a simple to use Java PDF API, that uses LGPL version of iText library to perform low-level PDF operations. Create, modify, export and print PDF documents right from your java program.

Debenu Quick PDF - Debenu Quick PDF Library is a powerful Windows and Mac royalty-free PDF toolkit for adding PDF functionality to your applications. It lets you create, render, print, secure, merge, split and manipulate PDF files with only a few lines of code

DreamSys Tiff to PDF API - The DreamSys PDF API is a DLL that can convert TIFF images into a PDF.

PDFaid API for PDF Conversion - Pdfaid online API helps you convert or manipulate pdf documents in your own applications. Our API’s are written taking into account various programming languages and scenarios. Our API can be used in asp.net, winforms (both c# and VB.net supported) or php environments.

ClickToConvert - Convert your Windows documents to PDF and HTML (web-pages) with our award winning tool, Click to Convert.

CVista Tookit -  the task of seamlessly integrating PDF conversion, compression, search, and web-optimization into your existing software just got simpler. With our SDK, the resulting documents and images will store smaller and transmit faster. 

ImPDF HTML to PDF - ImPDF HTML to PDF Converter is a PDF conversion service that allows you to convert you web pages and reports and images to adobe PDF files. ImPDF HTML to PDF Converter does support valid urls of your html, asp, php, .Net, cgi, jsp, etc. web pages for conversion to PDF files.

ABCpdf.NET - ABCpdf .NET lets you dynamically create Adobe® PDF documents on the fly. Because it doesn’t use any print drivers and goes Direct to PDF™, it’s incredibly fast.

Htm2pdf - Our HTML to PDF API allows you to convert HTML pages to PDF files with great ease, power and performance. You can use it manually and in any programming language. You will get a lot of different settings to optimize your conversion and make sure the PDF looks exactly the way YOU want it. 

You can also check this list of image recognition APIs.

Got images to analyze, modify, sell, or recognize? Or do you need generate images?   These APIs might help:

Wallpapers - Download high-resolution wallpapers for any common screen size from InterfaceLIFT.com

Imgur - Imgur’s API exposes the entire Imgur infrastructure via a standardized programmatic interface. Using Imgur’s API, you can do just about anything you can do on imgur.com, while using your programming language of choice

Face Recognition - Stephen here from Lambda Labs. For sample code and a graphical demo, check out http://api.lambdal.com/docs. Our API provides face recognition, facial detection, eye position, nose position, mouth position, and gender classification

CamFind - Image recognition back-end for the popular app CamFind. The ImageSearcher API lets you do reverse image search. Take advantage of the leading image recognition platform through an easy to use web API.

Nudity Detection Service - The NDS API allows developers to check for nudity in images in real-time.

ColorTag - ColorTag is a powerful API for color detection. Taking an image file (or URL) as input ColorTag produces a list of text labels and hex RGB values that can be then used as tags for a certain image or item.

ImageVision - NuditySearch - ImageVision’s NuditySearch - Recognizing nudity is a highly complex problem. NuditySearch tackles this problem by recognizing anatomical attributes and determining if there is nudity in images.

Animetrics Face Recognition - The Animetrics Face Recognition API can be used to detect human faces in pictures. Information on facial features or “landmarks” is returned as coordinates on the image.. Animetrics Face Recognition will also detect and return the orientation, or “pose” of faces along 3 axes. 

Porn Filter - Scan images and image URLs to determine if they contain inappropriate content. Send us an image, and we will tell you if it’s likely to be porn.

Instafilter.io - An easy RESTful API for manipulating images and applying customizable filters in real-time. You can use the built-in filters or create your own ones on top of our filters. And not only filters: includes resize, rotate and crop functions among the others.

IMG4Me - Text to Image Service - IMG4Me is a free service to convert your text into image. You can use this service to prevent crawlers and robots from copying your email address, articles, or website contents. 

Pdf2Image - The API for saving PDF pages to Image files. PDF pages can be extracted to jpg, png or tiff images.

Kooaba Image Recognition Upload - This API allows you to upload your own data for recognition. It is usually used together with the Query API to make recognition requests for the uploaded database.

Kooaba Image Recognition Query - This API allows you to make requests to our existing database of objects (e.g. CDs, DVDs, books, or your own database of reference images uploaded with the Data API).

Face Detection BETA - Beta Release A better Face detection service! ImageVision is a computer vision company improving technology that determines the locations and sizes of human faces in arbitrary (digital) images.

Static map - Get a valid static geo image map url from different map providers.

Imagga Smart Cropping - Imagga is a cloud platform that helps businesses and individuals organize their images in a fast and cost-effective way

SwissKnifeDocs - This API can convert documents into another document format. You can convert documents into images too , or you can simply fill the “merge fields” inside your .docx or .doc document and convert it into whatever format you want.

FaceRect - FaceRect is a powerful and free API for face detection. It finds faces (both frontal and profile) on the image specified by URL or uploaded as a file and is able to find multiple faces on a single photo, producing JSON output with a bounding box for each face found.

Search - The WebKnox search API lets you search the WebKnox Web index and news results.

OCR recognition service - Ocrapiservice.com is an cloud based optical recognition engine. We take images as input and we reply with text as output.

rethumb - This API creates (and host) thumbnails from images. Resize by width, height and crop to create squares.

Textibility - Textibility provides a simple, REST API for extracting information from images and documents in a number of formats and generating images and documents from structured data. With a simple, clean HTTP interface and some clever processing we can quickly and easily unlock information captured in photographs and file uploads. 

Pinterest (unofficial) - This is an unofficial Pinterest API. Pinterest is a pinboard-style photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies, and more. 

4chan - 4chan is a simple image-based bulletin board where anyone can post comments and share images. (NOTE: This API is not endorsed by 4chan. It is however pointing to the 4chan API as documented in Github).

Face and Scene recognition provided by ReKognition.com - Face.com alternative! Our fast, robust and scalable rekognition engine can do facial detection, crawling, recognition, scene understanding! It can be automatically trained using images and tags on Facebook! 

Word Cloud Maker - Generate Word Clouds from blocks of text. Multi color and different sizes illustrate the frequency, and the “vibe” of the bigger text. Try it with blog posts, article text, speeches, tweet histories, emails, or any other written word.

Infatics Face Detection - Simple face detection API.

SkyBiometry Face Detection and Recognition - An easy to use Face Detection and Recognition API. Detect faces at various angle, determine gender, check if the person is smiling or wears glasses (maybe sunglasses) with a single API call.

URL Screenshot Generator - Simply generate a png or jpg screenshot of a web page. Just pass the URL to this API and it will return a screenshot of what the page looks like in a browser. You can specify the width and height of the browser. 

websequencediagrams - The web’s #1 UML sequence diagram tool, saving you time since 2007.

Pagepeeker - Automate website screenshots creation. Generate screenshots in a matter of seconds. Never busy, so there’s no waiting in line. Rendering starts immediately and is finished quickly.

Website Screenshot Service - versCapture - Website Screenshot Service & Easy API. Home of the animated screenshot! Signup at verscapture.com to get started today!

Portrait3D - Portrait3D API is based on Avatarion’s Tethys 3D™ solution, and provides software developers with a technology to create animated facial models based on photos.

Web screenshot - Given a page url, it creates a screenshot and returns it’s url

Website screenshots in real time - Retrieve real-time screenshots with one request. 

Ribbet - Ribbet is an online photo editor with free cloud storage, complete editing history, thousands of effects, filters, hand-picked shapes, designer fonts and borders.

Pixmac stock photos - Sell photos from our database or just access our affiliate program and earn money.

Scene Understanding - With ReKognition API, your website or mobile app suddenly got a whole lot more powerful - Face detection/recognition, categorize photos (and auto-tagging objects in the near future!) without dealing with limited web page scripting languages.

GeoStockPhoto - GeoStockPhoto is a stock photo agency with high-quality photos from all around the world. Each photo is geotagged with latitude and longitude. All registered users can interact with our database and retrieve information of all photos on sale.

Pwinty - Pwinty lets you integrate photo and poster printing into your app or website, giving you an easy way to monitise it and delight your users

Nudity and adult-content detection - Detect nudity and porn in user-submitted photos in real-time. Slash your moderation costs. Get a response in a matter of seconds with a confidence score.

Do you need a payment gateway that can process up to 100 transaction currencies and over 23 payout currencies?  We’ve got your solution!

Mashape is proud to have PAYMILL join our community, one of the leading and most dependable payment service providers in Europe.  The PAYMILL API provides merchants with an easy-to-use payments solution that is quick to set up and widely available.  With minimal effort the API enables you to customize a checkout experience according to the flow of your website. 

Available in 39 countries, plus, with no monthly costs - only transaction based, we think you should include the PAYMILL API in your application.

David O’Neill, CEO of APImetrics, shares with us his insights on the importance of monitoring your API’s health.

APImetrics is a set of web-based tools that make it easy to create, manage, and schedule complex API tests, even those requiring authentication.  

Q: What are some examples of crucial data points that developers should track when they want to monitor the performance of their APIs?

Uptime - obviously.  A lot of people have a telecommunications ‘mindset’ of “5 nines” or 99.999% uptime… whereas the reality of most web APIs is 99% or worse.  Or to put that in another perspective - almost 2 hours a week of downtime!

Second, latency.  All of these APIs are slower to respond than developers think and for mobile developers especially, this is critical.  A Facebook Graph API search takes over 2 seconds.  That’s not including any network issues or how long it takes your app to process the response.  2 seconds is a lot of deadtime to build into your UI.

Q: What are the challenges today in getting developers to understand the importance of monitoring API health, and how does APImetrics address that?

Historically, people haven’t really had to think too much about their interactions with third party services.  So the real challenge is getting the message out that while APIs change everything when it comes to creating interesting and better apps - you need to think carefully about the API you pick, its general performance and the impact it will have on other services.  We spoke to a client today who are looking to decide on a POI data provider and are using trial calls from APImetrics to build up an outline of the reliability and performance of the leading options (Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and Foursquare) to see which one is best for their needs.  Before our service that was almost impossible without huge amounts of work.

Q: Is there any interesting insight on the performance data you’ve gathered so far with APImetrics?

Lots of interesting insight :-) - OAuth is much harder than people think.  We strongly recommend looking at OAuth services rather than try and do it yourself.  Also there’s a lot of day-to-day variation in the performance of APIs and they all have performance issues through a week that can slow them down to taking as long as 20 seconds to complete a call.  It’s important to keep an eye on those numbers so you can be ready for them.

Also, Pingdom doesn’t tell you if an API is down.  A lot of our clients have discovered that the hard way!

Q: How are people using APImetrics at the moment?

We’re not seeing any one particular use.  Some clients who provide APIs are using it to alert them when there are outages or performance problems.  Others are interested in comparing the performance of different sets of APIs in order to make a decision about what to use.  Finally, we’re seeing a lot of developers using it to prototype API calls and understand how an API works better so they save development time.

Below is an example of an embedded report we generated from APImetrics

Here’s a list of resources on how to make REST calls in different languages.  

If you dabble with one or more of these languages in your different projects, we highly recommend that you check out Unirest.io, an open source lightweight HTTP client library.  It’s goal is to provide a consistent way for developers to make HTTP calls across different languages (node.js, Ruby, PHP, Java, Python, Objective-C, .NET)

If you have suggested additions to the links below, please tweet to @mashape and we’ll add it here!

Node.js

1. http://stackoverflow.com/a/5643366/1681609 (Apr 2011)
2. http://stackoverflow.com/a/16155551/1681609 (Apr 2013)
3. http://rapiddg.com/blog/calling-rest-api-nodejs-script
4. http://isolasoftware.it/2012/05/28/call-rest-api-with-node-js/ (May 2012)

PHP

1. http://stackoverflow.com/a/9802854/1681609 (Mar 2012)
2. http://support.qualityunit.com/061754-How-to-make-REST-calls-in-PHP
3. http://developer.yahoo.com/php/howto-reqRestPhp.html
4. https://bcws.brightcloud.com/articles/code_php
5. https://developer.decibel.net/sample-code-rest-php
6. http://www.gen-x-design.com/archives/making-restful-requests-in-php/
7. http://www.lornajane.net/posts/2008/using-curl-and-php-to-talk-to-a-rest-service (Sep 2008)

Python

1. http://developer.yahoo.com/python/python-rest.html
2. http://developer.yahoo.com/python/python-rest.html (Feb 2008)
3. https://developer.decibel.net/sample-code-rest-python
4. http://jaimegildesagredo.github.io/2012/12/26/a-python-restful-api-consumer.html (Dec 2012)

Objective-C

1. http://rajneesh071.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-to-make-rest-api-call-in-objective-c.html (July 2013)
2. http://stackoverflow.com/a/4651233/1681609 (Dec 2012)
3. https://www.captechconsulting.com/blog/jack-cox/tutorial-simple-iphone-rest-client (Nov 2009)

Rails

1. http://stackoverflow.com/a/748657/1681609 (Apr 2009)

ASP.NET Web API / C# / .NET

1. http://www.asp.net/web-api/overview/web-api-clients/calling-a-web-api-from-a-net-client (July 2012)
2. http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/497123/How-to-make-REST-requests-with-Csharp (Nov 2012)
3. https://developer.decibel.net/sample-code-rest-csharp
4. http://rest.elkstein.org/2008/02/using-rest-in-c-sharp.html (Feb 2008)
5. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1842770/consume-rest-api-from-net
6. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj819168.aspx
7. http://blog.anthonybaker.me/2013/05/how-to-consume-json-rest-api-in-net.html (May 2015)
8. http://developer.yahoo.com/dotnet/howto-rest_cs.html
9. http://devlicio.us/blogs/derik_whittaker/archive/2009/02/15/getting-data-from-a-rest-service-using-c.aspx (Feb 2009)

Java / Android

1. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3913502/restful-call-in-java (Oct 2012)
2. http://stackoverflow.com/a/3506039/1681609 - Android (Aug 2010)
3. http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2012/09/simple-rest-client-in-java.html (Sept 2012)
4. https://bcws.brightcloud.com/articles/code_java
5. http://stackoverflow.com/a/5769576/1681609 - Android (Apr 2011)
6. http://timewasted.net/?p=127 (Mar 2010)
7. https://searchblox.tenderapp.com/kb/indexing/how-do-i-call-the-rest-api-from-java
8. http://rest.elkstein.org/2008/02/using-rest-in-java.html (Feb 2008)

Also check out these example POST requests in 27+ languages/frameworks.

We’re happy to announce that the Unirest library for .NET and RT (“windows 8”) has been merged!  This was possible thanks to Lionel Ringenbach’s contribution :)  

Lionel is a C#/XAML developer based in Switzerland.  He enjoys developing for Microsoft platforms (mobile, tablets, desktop).  He loved to code because "it is the most creative tool that has been given to me - you think, create, and make everyday a better day!"

We’ve asked him to write the post below.  Enjoy!

—-

The Unirest HTTP request library was ported sometime back for the classic .NET platform and WinRT.  They were packaged in 2 different libraries targeting their respective platforms.

The good news is that the library has now been unified into a single Portable Class Library (PCL)which makes Unirest availablefor all classic .NET 4, Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, and Silverlight 5 applications.  A Nuget package will be published in the coming weeks.

To illustrate and demonstrate the unification of Unirest within the .NET environment, I developed the ApiWorld app collection which consist of 3 quick and simple apps running on Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and WPF, all using the new library.

ApiWorld is a simple app that allows you to browse through APIs publicly available in Mashape.  (As these apps are only an illustration of Unirest on .NET platforms, their functionality is solely limited to loading basic Mashape APIs information).

(Clockwise: WPF, Windows Phone 8, Windows 8)

Now let’s dive a little bit into the specific implementation that shows how easy it is to use Unirest.

Then just nicely wrap this code into a service class that you can share between all your .NET apps and you’re done!  If you want to see a little more you can get the full source code of the app collection from the ApiWorld demo Github page.  (Click here to check out the service class where Unirest was used).

Mashape is proud to introduce Best Buy to our fast growing community of world-class developers and API providers.  

Best Buy is focused on connecting customers, employees and businesses through access to in-depth information about specific products and categories.  The company embraces developers and encourages them to build smart and helpful tools; ultimately, enhance a customer’s shopping experience.

The Best Buy API provides full category and product information to over 1m current and historical products, including up to date pricing.   Don’t forget reviews.  With the API you get access to all product ratings and reviews.   Need to find the closest store?  No problem, the Best Buy API provides location information and queries product availability throughout all their stores.

We’re excited to see what our developer community can build with Best Buy’s API.  Let us know what you’ve made and we’ll share your creation in an upcoming blog.

Here’s an example code snippet on how to access Best Buy’s API through Mashape (Products API example below in node.js):

The results will look like below:

If you’re around the SOMA area in San Francisco this Friday, December 6th, 7pm, feel free to drop by our “Party Like Jesus” holiday celebration!  RSVP here!

DJs, OPEN BAR, and lots of fun. See ya there mate!

Want to build an amazing financial trading app?  We’ve got the API for you!

Tradier is a next generation financial services technology solution with a bundled platform for tool providers, online banks, developers and investors.  Tradier offers a complete set of real-time APIs, data, and an advanced set of secure web and mobile modules for clients to deliver powerful investor experiences.

As a cloud based brokerage technology platform for trading and analytics, Tradier empowers application providers to bring their products to a larger audience of institutional and active retail traders.  Integration with Tradier’s API enables developers to build applications that offer execution capabilities to their customers, as well as offer access to third-party services connected to Tradier.

With Tradier offering trading in equities, options and complex options, and accompanied real time market data, Mashape is proud to have the Tradier API in our marketplace.  

Here’s a sample response from the Get Quotes endpoint:

Here’s a list of useful APIs to help you determine if that email address is real :)

Verify Email -  simple api that checks if an email address if valid and exists. It checks the format of the address then tries to contact the server to make sure the address exists.

Social Media Email Search - This API allows searching the popular social networks (facebook, linkedin, twitter, tumblr, myspace) for an email address. If found, the site ID will be returned.

Fluxifi Tools - Miscellaneous tools for getting page rank, page speed, validating domains & emails

Email Validator - Checks for fake DNS as well as uses regex functions to check the email for the right length and accepted characters.

Email Search by EmailSherlock - A reverse email search conducted at EmailSherlock.com can help determine the identity of the owner of an unknown address that shows up in your inbox. 

FullContact Person - The FullContact Person API takes a piece of contact information, such as an email address, and adds information such as name, job title, and social profile data from more than 120 different social networks - including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.

Block Disposable Email - The bdea.cc api helps to detect domains of disposable email address services such as mailinator.com, spamgourmet. In other words: if you need to keep your userbase clean you should avoid throw-away, one-time, instant, temporary email addresses.

Mailgun Email Validation - This API endpoint is an email address validation service. Given an arbitrary address, we will validate the address based on: Syntax checks (RFC defined grammar), DNS validation, Spell checks, Email Service Provider (ESP) specific local-part grammar (if available).

Email Pie - Email Pie is a wonderful little JSON API that gives you a simple way to validate email addresses. We’ll let you know if that email address is legit or not.

Free Email Verifier - You can use the API to verify emails via our site if you are a registered user.

Byteplant - With our free email validation service you can easily verify if an email address is real and valid.

Data 8 Email Validation Web Service API - Check email addresses as they are entered, right down to individual mailbox level. Correct errors in both the mailbox name and domain name parts of the address automatically.

DOTS Email Validation 3 - Improve the effectiveness of your email list marketing—instantly identify invalid email addresses in your customer database. DOTS Email Validation 3^SM by Service Objects is a real-time web service API that determines if an email address is genuine, accurate and deliverable.

PostcodeAnywhere Email Validation - The API lets you validate email addresses either on an individual basis or as a batch of up to 100 addresses. Tests will check for the existence of an appropriate mail server as well as performing syntax checks.

Email Checker - Email verification you can trust. Batch or real-time email verification. Deep checking down to mailbox level.

Verifalia - Software developers love to integrate Verifalia within their software applications, as the whole email validation service is exposed via an elegant and secure REST API, which uses JSON as its primary data interchange format. A couple of lines of code and Verifalia will validate email addresses from within your own applications!

BriteVerify - Never lose another conversion because of a user input error. Simply copy and paste a couple lines of code into your existing web form, mobile application, CRM or POS and emails are verified as instantly as they are entered. 

MelissaData Email Verification - Validate and parse email addresses, correct common typographical errors, and standardize email addresses as they are entered with Melissa Data’s Email Validation solutions. These solutions eliminate the need for a “confirm email” field which can decrease webform conversion rates. 

LeadSpend - Prompt users to correct invalid email address in-form or filter out bad addresses as they enter your system with our validation API. We provide JavaScript code that integrates seamlessly with your existing forms to validate email addresses without inconveniencing your visitors. Our hosted email validation API can be integrated at any point in your email collection funnel.

ListWise - We analysed the results of the hundreds of millions of email addresses we have cleaned to design a new email list-cleaning engine that is more powerful than ever. Try ListWise II for free and take your email marketing performance to new highs.

StrikeIron - Building upon the past decade of experience, StrikeIron has created two Email Verification Solutions that instantly detect the validity and reliability of email addresses. These solutions will increase your email deliverability, as well as enhance email marketing campaign performance and customer relationship management.

TowerData - By using TowerData’s Email Verification API to clean and correct email addresses at the point of entry, you’ll improve both the quality of your email list and your email delivery rates.

Emaitor - Our API will ensure your customers enter a valid email address and receive their order details, saving your business crucial customer service time. The Emailtor API will minimize your visitors from entering false or typo based emails.

Webemailverifier - Swift Email Verifier offers a real-time email validation and scrubbing APIs (Application Programming Interface) accessible via aRESTful API call.

Accudata - Validate email addresses to keep your marketing data clean Protect and improve your IP reputation Increase your chances to make it to the inbox 

EmailValidate - EmailValidate is a web service which validates email addresses using various methods, including: Syntax validation, MX record lookup, SMTP availability

Experian - Experian Data Quality offers a hosted web service, ideal for cleaning email addresses from customer-facing websites or internal web applications. QAS Email accurately identifies whether an email address is valid and deliverable, allowing you to remove harmful email addresses before you mail.

Want to add your API on this list?  Tweet to @mashape

Managing dependencies for your Java applications is difficult, unless you have Maven!  Maven is an Apache build manager for Java projects.  In this post, we will use a Maven plugin (Maven Assembly) to pull all the unirest-java dependencies in one bundle/jar file.

Let’s get started (the steps below assume you already have Java and Git installed):

1.  Download/Install Maven

To check if you already have Maven in your machine, run..

"mvn -version"

in your Terminal.  OS X prior to Maverick already comes with Maven.  If you don’t have Maven yet, you can head over to this download page and install it.  (Also make sure to set $JAVA_HOME accordingly).  If everything’s good, the output should look something like below:

2.  Clone the unirest-java repository

Pick a folder where you want to clone the unirest-java repository, and run..

"git clone https://github.com/Mashape/unirest-java.git”

This will download the source for unirest-java.  Note that in the root folder, there’s a pom.xml file.  This contains the directive for the Maven Assembly Plugin to generate a jar file of the unirest-java library bundled together with the required dependencies.

3.  Call the Maven Assembly plugin

To invoke the assembly plugin, run..

"mvn clean assembly:assembly"

Run this in the root folder of your cloned unirest-java repository.  This would pick up the directive in the pom.xml file and start bundling the unirest library into a jar file, along with its dependencies. It would also run unit tests to make sure everything’s good.

If successful, it should generate a /target folder with the following contents:

The jar file we need is underlined in the image above.  We can then import this into our project like below (shown here in Eclipse):

Here’s a sample code that uses unirest-java:

This post will show you how to get Unirest-java running on your Android projects.  Unirest is a lightweight HTTP client library with port available in many languages.

This is a follow-up to “How to install Unirest using the Maven assembly plugin”.  The steps are similar, with the addition of a Maven (shader) plugin that relocates some packages in order to work around dependency errors when using the uber jar in an Android project. (In case you’re interested, the error you’ll get is ”java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: org.apache.http.message.BasicLineFormatter.INSTANCE”).

Let’s start:

1.  Follow Steps 1 and 2 from the Unirest-java/Maven tutorial. Once you’re done with those 2 steps, you should already have Maven working, and a clone of the Unirest-java repository.

2. Modify pom.xml in the cloned unirest-java repo to call the Maven shader plugin. You need to add the following inside the <plugins></plugins> tags.

This allows us to fix dependency references when using the Unirest uber JAR in Android.  It calls the Maven shader plugin to relocate offending dependencies.

3. Call the Maven Assembly plugin

To invoke the assembly plugin, run…

"mvn clean assembly:assembly"

Run this in the root folder of your cloned unirest-java repository.  This would pick up the directive in the pom.xml file and start bundling the unirest library into a jar file, along with its dependencies.  It would also run unit tests to make sure everything’s good.

If successful, it should generate a /target folder with the following contents:

The jar file we need is underlined in the image above.  We can then import this into our project like below (shown here in Eclipse):

Here’s a sample screenshot and code that uses unirest-java in an Android project (Download sample code from Github).

Hope this helps.  If you have questions, tweet to @mashape

More pictures and videos to come!

If you’re a Windows 8 developer, install the Apiworld app for Windows 8.1 now.  From the app description..

Description

Features

• Random API every time you open the app
• Search and Share Charm Features

.

The app was created by Abdullah Abbas aka “socialstalker”,  and was extended from Lionel Ringenbach’s sample code demonstrating the unification of the Unirest-net library.

What’s next? Why a Windows Phone app of course!  Tweet to @mashape if you’d like to contribute.

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