Additional material and support for hackathon events
Developing applications to incorporate APIs requires a complete development environment. Because many applications are written in JavaScript, it is possible to write all of the code in a text editor. However, it is often beneficial to have an environment that can check the syntax of the code, manage multiple files within a single project and run test.
Atom.io - fully customizable text editor which was released by GitHub. (It’s free!).
Getting Started with Atom provides step-by-step instructions for installing Atom.
Atom Basics is a great tutorial within the Atom documentation.
Sublime Text - is a feature-rich text editor that has been very popular for years (It’s a commercial product but you can use it for free).
There are a lot of other text editors on the market:
Swagger.io – A syntax-specific editor to create API specifications (useful for writing APIs)
These are the programming environments for writing actual code which is essential if you are going to create an application.
Visual Studio Code - one of the best source code editor available as it supports a wide variety of languages, has a rich community of plugins and works for Windows, Mac and Linux. It offers a built-in terminal window so that you can run your code directly from within the IDE.
Visual Studio Code was developed by Windows and released as open source (Free!)
Eclipse - another popular open source IDE. Eclipse is extremely extensible and supports multiple languages.
CodeAnywhere - an online IDE that requires no installation.
Git is the ubiquitious open source standard for managing code today and is ideal for accessing files at such large public repositories like GitHub. First, you will need to have git installed on your computer. It is freely available for download.
Postman is a great tool to test connections to APIs and ensure that the desired data is being returned. You can also share test cases with other people.
It is not necessary to have a database to consume APIs. When writing an API, however, it is usually important to have a storage mechanism for keeping data. Often these data are kept in JSON format which are documents.
MongoDB – the most popular open database for JSON objects