Technical-Resources

This section provides numerous educational resources regarding the technologies that likely will be encountered during this hackathon.

Basic Principles

When we visit a retail web site, we are able to see the product details and perhaps even customer reviews. The site may indicate if there are any physical stores near our location and whether they have any available inventory on hand. At check out, the website will process our payment and schedule our order for fulfillment. Most of this magic is performed through APIs.

An application programming interface, or API, is a set of functions within one computer program that are externally exposed so that a different application can access those functions and leverage those capabilities to enhance itself.

APIs are extremely useful, providing access to features, data or other services.

Examples:

• Retrieving weather data
• Finding property listings
• Marketplace inventory
• Reserving vacation packages

During this event, you will be developing applications that take advantage of existing banking services, and possibly other services, to creatively solve problems and provide a unique user experience. The core of these services will come in the form of APIs.

Main features:

• Primarily used to request or update data
• Exposes only those methods that are needed for public consumption
• Technology agnostic
  • Underlying technology or programming language is hidden
  • Don’t need to know the message structure
• Stateless - all the data is sent once
• Uses common HTTP/HTTPS

Other resources:

• Required Reading - Collection of online content to learn more about APIs.

• Additional Development Tools - A list of different open source technologies and tools useful for creating applications