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Application Programming Interfaces (API) have become something commonly widespread for a lot of applications. They are used to make a central implementation of business logic requirements, which can then be easily maintained, changed, and used from multiple clients implemented in different stacks of technologies. A typical end user might not be informed about the existence of APIs, but he is most likely enjoying the benefits of APIs. Knowing that there are very popular applications that have public APIs which you can leverage for your applications, it is time to think using them a lot more.

Is there any existing API that I can use in my application?

When you start to develop something new, one of the first questions that you should ask yourself is whether there is something similar already developed by someone else. A new question that might not be that common in software engineering lectures is asking whether there exists an API that you can communicate with that can help you get content that can give your audience a better experience. You are not only saving so much time and effort instead of preparing your own content, but you are also ensuring that your users get the content that might be coming from experts work for a particular field.

A typical example of a public API that would hugely make your application content rich and enhance the user experience in your application would be using NASA’s public API. If you are developing an astronomy related application, and want to use all the data that NASA provides, you do not have to copy them manually and repeatedly go back and forth, trying to include the latest updates in your application. You can simply set to display the responses that you get from NASA’s API and use them directly in your application. Now each time NASA adds new content, it will automatically be added in your application as well, without asking you to make any changes later on.

Here is a long list of public APIs that you can use for your own applications. Chances are that you will find a useful API there for your own application as well. If you know any other public API that is not in that list, you can contribute to this open source list and help your fellow developers.
Of course, there might be cases when there is not any pre-existing API that can fit in your particular application’s scope. Nonetheless, there are tons of ones that can be of assistance to you.