What Can You Build With An API?

If you’ve been around the forums, as I know most of you are, then you probably know about the API that FlashDen is implementing. It will also be available for the rest of the Envato marketplaces.

What’s an API? Good question.

An application programming interface (API) is a set of routines, data structures, object classes and/or protocols provided by libraries and/or operating system services in order to support the building of applications. An API may be:

- Language-dependent; that is, available only in a particular programming language, using the particular syntax and elements of the programming language to make the API convenient to use in this particular context.

- Language-independent; that is, written in a way that means it can be called from several programming languages (typically an assembly/C-level interface). This is a desired feature for a service-style API that is not bound to a particular process or system and is available as a remote procedure call.

You can read more technical aspects about it here.

Translated it means – You can now plug into all the data that FlashDen makes available via it’s API to build your own applications that can present this data in whatever output method you choose.

Sites like Twitter, Digg and even Google offer API’s and a lot of people have built a lot of stuff with them. I’ve built a widget around the twitter API myself! {Well, OK my developer buddy implemented it for me }

As you can see in the forums, some “denners” are already getting started with building out a few apps. By the way, if you don’t know how to get your API key it’s under the “Edit” tab of your account.