Ask HN – Simple APIs Without Authentication? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN – Simple APIs Without Authentication?

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I want to teach some kids about REST APIs.

Are there any good / fun / interesting ones which don't require authentication?

I'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.

So far, I've found Google Books and Location, Wikipedia, and the iTunes Store Search.

Have you come across anything which is useful for getting kids interested?

Has to be:

* No authentication needed.

* Well structured output.

* Interesting data.

* Child friendly.

* Current.

* Preferably free (libre and gratis).

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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 can be viewed in JSON format at 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

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

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

[4] http://blog.trovebox.com/post/11031677122/building-openphoto...

Really useful, thanks!

If you don't mind a UK specific API, there is 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/...

Based on my blog post at http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/04/wanted-simple-apis-without-a...

You could take a look at the Apigee list 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/.

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.

My company, OpenCNAM (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!

Your HTTPS certificate throws up errors in Firefox.

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/

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

That's brilliant! Thanks :-)

Open Weather Map http://openweathermap.org/

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

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

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