5 Api’s we have worked with and like
5. MailGun
We find ourselves using this product in almost every application we build. Mailgun is a transactional email api service. Mailgun enables developers to send, track and receive emails via their api which is pretty basic transactional email functionality.
One feature we really like is the ability to create routes to allow some basic logic around receiving an email from a specific sender. Create a route to store the email, notify a webhook in your application, get the email from Mailgun via the api and finally process the information or download the attachment… really whatever you need to do.
4. Google Maps
Most web developers have come across a project where they need to show a location(s) on a map. In our mind, Google maps is really the only option out there (If anyone uses something else, what is it?). Because this is a Google product, it is well documented, there are lots of examples and it can be implemented on pretty much any platform and language
3. Facebook
Facebook integration is something that a lot of clients request, whether it’s allowing users to sign in with Facebook or post on walls from a third party application. Facebook opens up a lot of features to allow developers to create deep integrations with their systems.
We have recently added the Facebook SDK to one of our mobile apps (Android & iOS), and if your company/product uses Facebook advertising this is a must. Developers can log actions of almost any kind and track weather or not your ads are converting to downloads, which really helps on the marketing side
2. Amazon’s Web Services
Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) provides developers everything they could need when it comes to cloud computing. Along with some awesome products they provide a fantastic api layer to interact with whatever crazy set up clients may need.
Spinning up on demand instances, passing in data on creation of instance and attaching volumes was simple, due to the well documented api. Amazon provides SDKs for a lot of the major programming languages.
1. Stripe
We have now integrated Stripe into 8 different projects, all with different requirements. Stripe’s documentation will give you everything you need from a simple javascript snippet or custom payment forms to examples in PHP, Ruby, Python, Java and more. If Stripe doesn’t have a library for the development stack your team is using, there are tons of third party libraries (One of the projects we integrated Stripe with was Coldfusion…. that’s right, Coldfusion).
Once you have set up your account, you will have access to the development docs as well as the sandbox/test mode. This will streamline your testing, allowing for quick development and happy clients.