

Ask HN – Simple APIs Without Authentication? - edent

I want to teach some kids about REST APIs.<p>Are there any good &#x2F; fun &#x2F; interesting ones which <i>don&#x27;t</i> require authentication?<p>I&#x27;d love to use Flickr and Twitter - but both require quite a cumbersome setup - I just want to focus on retrieving interesting data and doing something with it.<p>So far, I&#x27;ve found Google Books and Location, Wikipedia, and the iTunes Store Search.<p>Have you come across anything which is useful for getting kids interested?<p>Has to be:<p>* No authentication needed.<p>* Well structured output.<p>* Interesting data.<p>* Child friendly.<p>* Current.<p>* Preferably free (libre and gratis).
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jmathai
OpenPhoto (now Trovebox) is an open source project [1] with an API you can use
without authentication.

Something which might be helpful to teach your child is that the API endpoint
has a corresponding HTML (visual) representation.

For example, the web page at
[https://current.trovebox.com/photos/list](https://current.trovebox.com/photos/list)
can be viewed in JSON format at
[https://current.trovebox.com/photos/list.json](https://current.trovebox.com/photos/list.json).
The response is standard across all APIs [2] and the API itself is well
documented[3].

This applies to most pages and we blogged about how we did that for easy
discoverability[4].

[1] [https://github.com/photo/frontend](https://github.com/photo/frontend)

[2]
[https://trovebox.com/documentation/api/Envelope](https://trovebox.com/documentation/api/Envelope)

[3] [https://trovebox.com/documentation](https://trovebox.com/documentation)

[4] [http://blog.trovebox.com/post/11031677122/building-
openphoto...](http://blog.trovebox.com/post/11031677122/building-openphoto-
entirely-using-our-api)

~~~
edent
Really useful, thanks!

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samlevy
If you don't mind a UK specific API, there is
[http://postcodes.io](http://postcodes.io).

No authentication needed, it uses open data which is a plus, it can be demoed
from the home page.

It may not be the most interesting for children by itself but you can always
hook it up to Google Maps or MapBox.

There is also Google's geocoder which can be used without an API key last time
I checked and they have pretty good demos.

[https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/geocoding-
simple)

------
edent
Based on my blog post at [http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/04/wanted-simple-apis-
without-a...](http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/04/wanted-simple-apis-without-
authentication/)

------
palcu
You could take a look at the Apigee list
[https://apigee.com/providers](https://apigee.com/providers).

The Facebook API also has a simple authentication. Just go to the graph
explorer and get your token
[https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/](https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/).

~~~
edent
Thanks - the goal is to have no authentication whatsoever. I can't guarantee
that all the kids are allowed on Facebook - and I want to minimise the amount
of "magic numbers" they're exposed to.

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rdegges
My company, OpenCNAM ([https://opencnam.com/](https://opencnam.com/)) provides
a caller ID API with a pretty generous free tier. No signup required. You can
hit the public API endpoints directly with a GET request, and get back caller
ID information for a given phone number. Enjoy!

~~~
edent
Your HTTPS certificate throws up errors in Firefox.

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chrisfarms
Yahoo weather API[1] might be usable.

A Text-to-Speech API[2] could be fun for kids I guess.

[1] [http://developer.yahoo.com/weather/](http://developer.yahoo.com/weather/)

[2] [http://tts-api.com/](http://tts-api.com/)

~~~
edent
That's brilliant! Thanks :-)

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zackboe
Open Weather Map [http://openweathermap.org/](http://openweathermap.org/)

I believe you can make a handful of requests without including an API key, but
the free tier is pretty generous.

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stevenspasbo
Reddit's API is really easy to use, not sure if the data is going to be all
that interesting or kid friendly, though.

