Web Service Application Programming Interface (API) is an interface implemented by a software program to enable interaction with other software, similar to the way a user interface facilitates interaction between humans and computers.

The API (Application Programming Interface) has been an essential component for creating applications that hook into or utilize web apps such as Facebook and Flickr. The practice of publishing APIs has allowed web communities to create an open architecture for sharing content and data between communities and applications.

In this way, content that is created in one place can be dynamically posted or updated in multiple locations on the web. Sharing live comments made on Twitter to a Facebook account, for example, is enabled by Twitter and Facebook’s APIs. With it, developers have been able to create some amazing mashups and tools. Some of the most helpful applications on the web wouldn’t be possible without APIs. Here are my pick of the best 10 on the web…

1.Google Maps API

The Google Maps API is the most used code on the web. It lets you embed Google Maps in your own web pages with JavaScript. The API provides a number of utilities for manipulating maps (just like on the http://maps.google.com web page) and adding content to the map through a variety of services, allowing you to create robust maps applications on your website. While most API’s are data servers, with the Google Maps API you take control of an instance of the application itself using JavaScript.  To use a Google Maps you need an API key

2. Flickr API

Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of mashups that rely on the Flickr API to add a little bit of visual appeal. With 3-5 million new photos uploaded to the site daily and recently passing the 4 billionth photos, it’s no wonder that developers are excited to use it. It’s a simple call-and-response-based API, but with extensive tailored support for your chosen language. It communicates using REST, XML-RPC or Soap and gets your data back in XML, JSON or PHP. One of this API’s great strengths is the number of third-party developer tools and libraries.  For more information on Flickr’s API visit the Official Flickr API documentation page, which offers a ton of information about using the API and links to third-party API kits.

3.Facebook Platform / Facebook Connect

Facebook is the king of the social media network. The site is driven by user contributions, offering coders a rare platform that hooks you directly into an eager audience. Facebook’s bespoke mark-up language – PHP and FBML are use for coding their Apps. With over 350,000 active applications on the Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect, that easily makes Facebook’s platform and Connect API among the hottest development platforms on the web today. More information on this can be found at the Facebook Developers site, one of the most complete and well-made and maintained developer sites on the web.

4.Twitter API

Twitter is a community with one question: “What are you doing now?” The API lets you take that data in XML format and combine it with your own code or other API’s predictably; geographic mapping applications top the list, showing the location of group members.  The place to start, of course, is the Official API Wiki, which Twitter has packed with documentation, guides, tutorials, known issues, and FAQs for dealing with the Twitter API and OAuth

5.eBay API

eBay’s API is more powerful than ever, and offers plenty of functionality for creating powerful and interesting applications. Normally, users buy and sell items using the eBay online interface, interacting with eBay directly. But with the eBay API, you communicate directly with the eBay database. Of the services in our countdown, eBay’s API is the best-supported. It’s the most comprehensive and complex of the bunch. After registering, you’re able to generate a set of authentication keys for the API’s sandbox to build and test sample applications.

6.Amazon e-Commerce API

Amazon’s E-Commerce Service (ECS), an industrial-strength collection that Amazon describes as “The best way to make money on the internet”. ECS gives you back-end access to Amazon, enabling you to build seamless store fronts into your own website using the “most modern computer language”. The API provides programmatic access to Amazon’s product selection and discovery functionality so that developers can advertise Amazon products to monetize their website. As you might expect, Amazon’s is a security conscious provider, so you will need to create a dedicated web services account at (aws.amazon.com) where you will be assigned a unique access key.

7.YouTube

YouTube APIs and Tools enable you to integrate YouTube’s video content and functionality into your website, software application, or device. The video site’s API offers only a handful of functions, which return XML data in response to REST or XML-RPC calls.

• The Data API lets you incorporate YouTube functionality into your own application or website. It returns data in fixed sets that allows you to perform searches, upload videos, create playlists, and more.
• YouTube Direct allows you to request user generated content from your site visitors, moderate the submissions, and display them on your site.
• The Custom Player takes you a step beyond just pasting a video into your site. You configure the custom player to show playlists, favourites, or their own videos.
• The Player APIs give you control over YouTube video playback on your website.
• Widgets are simple page elements you can embed in your website to give it YouTube functionality. It allows users to perform a video search just by adding some JavaScript to your page.
• The Developer Dashboard shows you at a glance the number of API requests, playbacks, uploads and errors that your app is generating.

You’ll need to sign up for a developer account to use the YouTube API.

8. Digg API

Digg is a social news website and offers a comprehensive, complex API that responds to HTTP GET or POST queries by returning data in a specified format. The API offers XML, JSON data formats and scripting with JavaScript or PHP. The Digg API documentation details dozens of end points or data locations and you can access individual stories, comments or data on particular user activities.

9. Delicious API

Delicious, the world’s leading social bookmarking service combines search and tag features to make your favourite sites easier to find. The API is a straight forward REST-based handful of functions. Though it’s not well documented as many other APIs, Delicious is so simple you can see result just by typing a URL into your browser, using your Delicious log-in. For example to see a list of all your bookmarks, you use the URL del.icio.us/api/posts/all

10. FeedBurner API

Rss feed creation tool FeedBurner offers developers an established library of APIs for interacting with the service. FeedBurner is a web feed management provider that provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters, and other web-based content publishers.

Currently the library contains three APIs:

• The most useful is the FeedFlare API, which enables you to bolt new functionality onto FeedBurner feeds using XML.
• The FeedBurner Awareness API allows publishers of FeedBurner feeds to reuse the detailed traffic statistics captured for any of their feeds.
• The FeedBurner Management API allows publishers of FeedBurner feeds to create and manage feeds within their FeedBurner accounts.

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Building a website that looks pretty good and has working (and secure) scripts can be a strenuous task. Below is a list of resources for you to take advantage of if you need an element for your website but creating it yourself is beyond your skill set.

Edit content with minimal knowledge of HTML

If you are a Websoftnet Premium web hosting customer you can install Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress (yes its officially for blogs but it is being used more and more as a CMS), Joomla, Drupal or Mambo with just one click. Once these are set up you need never edit an HTML file again (although you can if you still want to!). To get started log in to your eXtend web hosting control panel.

Create attractive looking website without HTML/ CSS or Illustrator

I can hold a paint brush but that doesn’t mean I can paint and just because you know how to use the software that doesn’t mean you can design a beautiful website. To get yourself started or even to use it as it is “out of the box” here are some great websites to download readymade designs. Some are free, others require payment.

• http://www.onedollartemplates.com/
• http://www.freecsstemplates.org/
• http://www.free-css.com/
• http://www.woothemes.com (WordPress themes)
• http://www.styleshout.com/
• http://www.rockettheme.com/ (Joomla templates plus WordPress themes)
• http://joomla2u.net/ (Joomla templates)
• http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ (free WordPress themes)

Edit images without Photoshop

Admittedly you’ll never be able to hit the dizzy heights of those that can use the likes of Photoshop but you don’t need to for most sites. Being able to rotate, re-size and crop an image is enough for the majority of editing requirements and you can do it all online with these programs:

• http://www.picnik.com/
• http://pixlr.com/
• http://fotoflexer.com/
• http://aviary.com/

Deploying scripts without understanding the code

It may sound odd that anyone could so this, but as the majority of free scripts come with nice clear step by step installation instructions, with only a little bit of knowledge you can add advanced scripts to your site quickly and relatively easily. For example, if faced with a blank text editor I wouldn’t be able to write a secure “contact us” form, but I can certainly copy & paste one in to my site or click ‘install’ on a WordPress plug-in!

• http://www.hotscripts.com/
• http://www.phpjunkyard.com/
• http://www.codango.com
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ (WordPress plug-ins)
• http://extensions.joomla.org/ (Joomla extensions)

Still not enough? if you don’t want to have to do any of the work, you can always buy a readymade website: http://flippa.com

Web design is big business. With computers and the Internet becoming more accessible than ever before, there are alot of individuals and businesses trying their hand at web design. It is no surprise that there are a lot of powerful, full featured and expensive design applications out there in the market available to amateur and professional designers
and programmers.

So if you are either just starting out as a money-conscious designer, or you’re a veteran coder, you probably already have a good idea about the commercial software available to you. Here we will draw your attention to the Open Source alternatives in the design industry.  Open Source software has larges communities of developers and testers,
and Open Source software is some of the best written software in the world.

So, without further ado, we bring you a top 5 list of Open Source alternatives to commonly used commercial applications.

Aptana Studio instead of Dreamweaver – http://www.aptana.com/studio

Aptana Studio is a HTML and CSS design suite. It is also used by programmers who write in PHP, Ruby and others. It works very similarly to Dreamweaver in that it has both a design and code view, has syntax highlighting, comes with code snippets, and will also FTP files to your website for you. If you have used Dreamweaver in the past then Aptana would feel very familiar to you, with a few nice surprises (especially for those AJAX lovers out there).

GIMP instead of Photoshop – http://www.gimp.org/

GIMP is almost a ‘clone’ of Photoshop. It works in very similar way with its layers, selections, filters and painting tools. It can even read and write in Photoshop format, making it ultra compatible with your Photoshop using colleagues or clients. The software doesn’t feel quite as polished as Photoshop does, and its text manipulation is a little
behind Photoshop’s. But, if you’re like the majority of people who use Photoshop to resize their images, reduce the colours, and maybe add the odd special effect to add a little extra to your websites, then the GIMP is definitely something you should try!

Inkscape instead of Illustrator – http://www.inkscape.org/

Inkscape is a vector drawing programs with features similar to that of Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw. It has a very large feature set, including n-sided object creation, text effects, raster images, gradients, layers, opacity and paths. It can read and write in many formats, including XML, SVG and complies with W3C standards. It can also read AI and SVG files exported from Illustrator. A fine and free alternative.+

OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office – http://www.openoffice.org/

Open Office.org (or OOo for short) is a direct replacement for Microsoft’s Office suite (excluding Outlook). It is a very mature project and they have very recently released version 3.1.0. You can use replacements for Word, Excel, Power-Point and Access. OOo can also read and write in any of the native file formats, as well as a few others (like PDF) which older versions of Office can’t. This one comes highly recommended.

Firefox with the Web Developer Extension – http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/

This one needs mentioning here because it’s a great way to tweak your final design and seeing the changes magically appear in front of your very eyes. Not sure whether you want a 2 or 3 pixel border? Just change the CSS in Web Developer Extension and see your changes as they happen. This one is definitely recommended for those fine-tuners.

If you want people to be able to email you from your site, but don’t like spam (who does?) then our new and improved Form to Email is what you need. It’s available through Websoftnet’s eXtend 2.0 Control Panel. Click on Form to Email, choose a directory to install into and it will be installed and configured for you.

Thanks to the addition of an image code verification field, like on most website registration forms, only real people will be able to send you email. This should help keep your inbox a bit cleaner.

The form is completely customisable and will allow you to put all sorts of form data into it. Anything from text boxes to radio buttons will be submitted to you by email.

You can change the email address that the form is submitted to, as well as setting up a page for the user to be forwarded to thanking them for their message.

Log in to eXtend (http://www.eXtendcp.com/) to give it a go.