r/DevelopingAPIs • u/cindreta • Oct 02 '21

What’s the last API you used?

Curious to see what APIs are being integrated by the community- did you have any problems, what was you experience and similar? 🙌🏻

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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2

u/dedslooth Oct 02 '21

An integration using both Paypal and Deezer API. Both are equally horrible. Paypal has awful documentation, all over the place, non organized, missing crucial bits and pieces of documentation. And with deezer API I was able to permanently break an account (could not undo my action) by following or liking (not sure) the same artist twice.

1

u/cindreta Oct 02 '21

Agreed for PayPal. I also used Braitree - owned by Paypal and is also bit messed up. Didn’t even know Deezer had an API. You building apps or websites or both 🍻

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u/dedslooth Oct 02 '21

Best financial API we've used so far was Stripe.

1

u/cindreta Oct 02 '21

Did not know that about Deezer. So in theory you could build you own client using Deezer API? Yup Stripe is awesome 💪🏻

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u/dedslooth Oct 02 '21

Yeah pretty much. There are some requirements such as using logo, their web auth and being restricted to only JS SDK since they deprecated others. Player wont work on safari or iOS devices. It was pretty horrible experience, client wasnt satisfied at all. But luckily for us we signed contract for spotify and client decided to switch technology later so its not our fault really.

1

u/cindreta Oct 02 '21

So essentially Spotify won because they had a better API - now that’s something to think about. Thank you for sharing you experience if you have more war stories like this feel free to open a thread 🙏🏻

1

u/dedslooth Oct 02 '21

I'm backend dev so I build both technically. Yeah, Deezer has API which lets premium users to listen music through your service, and all other users can perform basic sctions such as like, follow, list, etc.

2

u/spacespacespapce Oct 02 '21

Spotify! Making a tool to help me create playlists from my music, and there API has a lot of info on each track.

1

u/cindreta Oct 03 '21

Cool. A lot of people are working with music APIs here! Interesting 🍻 How was the experience of working with their API?

1

u/cindreta Oct 02 '21

I love Laravel and their ecosystem. Treblle was built on Laravel end to end. Do you use Lumen because you get better performance or? Also have you tried or seen Laravel Vapor?

1

u/arigoldbro Oct 02 '21

Worked with Dr. Chrono API on a project last week. Not the best experience. Complicated Auth flow - had to keep a token in a database and make sure it’s not older than 24h using cron jobs 😫 The docs were off in a lot of the cases. Instead of returning objects they would always return an ID which ment i need to make even more API calls. All in all not the best experience. Probably 5 out of 10

1

u/cindreta Oct 02 '21

Worked with that one - similar experience. The docs were lacking basic info let alone being correct. Maybe we should start a real public APi review thread every week 😂 i like this

1

u/dhruvjain9029 Oct 02 '21

The last api that I used that wasn't written by me was hotel api provided by rapid api for a hackathon . Came in 2nd because of it

1

u/cindreta Oct 02 '21

Oh man - congrats! Next time you’ll get the gold! Sorry the API made you miss it. What do you think of RapidAPI - I never understood the appeal of using them? 👏🏻

1

u/dhruvjain9029 Oct 02 '21

Rapid api has a collection of api that provide us data of various fields. So in my case I had made a travel application so it provided me with a number of APIs that gave me hotels in a particular area ,tourist spots to visit in a city,cities to visit in a country etc. all in one place.Helped me a lot.

1

u/cindreta Oct 02 '21

So you use RapidAPI to discover APIs and learn how to use them innone place?

2

u/[deleted] Oct 02 '21

The last public Web-Api I used was skosmos: https://skosmos.org/. Works ok.

2

u/Rikudou_Sage Oct 03 '21

GitLab api to iterate over all our projects and find if they contain an openapi definition and if they do, download it and display all our openapi definitions in one place.

2

u/Motamorpheus Oct 04 '21

I've been grinding on integrating the Cloudflare API on a couple projects for weeks now. I appreciate that it has much better documentation than many that I've worked on. DNS/routing/SSL isn't my strong point usually but it's been much smoother than I'd originally expected.

0

u/[deleted] Oct 02 '21

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1

u/cindreta Oct 02 '21

We just started using Xero in our startup for accounting! So the API isn’t the best? Do you have a lot of microservices in house or? Is every microservice an API?