16 great APIs for web development
We’ll be going over 16 of the most commonly used APIs and what they can contribute to your next web development project.
#1-3: Amazon APIs: Product Advertising, DynamoDB, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
Amazon provides a number of free APIs that can be used in web development projects. Although these APIs are most often used for eCommerce applications, they can also be used for other purposes.
Note: You can use the Amazon API Gateway pricing calculator to get a custom estimate for your web application. The Free Tier includes one million API calls received for REST APIs or HTTP APIs, and one million messages and 750,000 connection minutes for WebSocket APIs per month for up to 12 months[2]
Amazon Product Advertising API
The Amazon Product Advertising API[3] is one of two free Amazon APIs, the other being Amazon Marketplace Web Service (MWS), which will be deprecated after December 31, 2023.
The Product Advertising API allows developers to access Amazon’s massive product catalog and retrieve information on products such as prices, availability, and customer reviews. It offers a wide range of features that can be integrated into a website or mobile device applications and includes support for banners, product listings, videos, coupons, and more.
Some of its resources include:
- Images: Returns the URLs for all available images of an item in three sizes:
Small,Medium, andLarge - VariationSummary: Provides the lowest price, highest price, and variation dimensions for all variations in an API response.
- Offers: Contains various resources related to offer listings and item summaries
The Product Advertising API supports the following operations:
GetBrowseNodes: Look up information for a Browse NodeGetItems: Look up item informationGetVariations: Look up information for variationsSearchItems: Searches for items on Amazon using keywords
If you’re looking to display advertising content on your web applications or build Amazon-integrated apps that enable customers to shop directly via the app, then the Amazon Product Advertising API is a solid option to consider.
Again, the Product Advertising API is free[4]. All you need to do is sign up to become a Product Advertising API developer.
Note: Most accounts will be limited to 50 requests per second, but higher limits are available for some accounts.
Amazon DynamoDB API
The Amazon DynamoDB API is designed to be used with the AWS SDK and allows developers to access and manipulate data stored in Amazon DynamoDB tables. DynamoDB is a fast and scalable NoSQL database service that is commonly used in distributed database management systems.
The DynamoDB API is most useful for applications where you need fine-grained control over your data or for applications that need to perform DynamoDB operations in a high-performance environment with high availability.
Here are a few DynamoDB API operations:
PutItem: Creates a new item or replaces an existing one with a new itemGetItem: Retrieves an item from a DynamoDB tableUpdateItem: Modifies an existing item in a DynamoDB table
Note: Some of DynamoDB API’s endpoints allow for DynamoDB Streams, which provide a time-ordered sequence of item-level changes on a DynamoDB table. This can be useful for building event-driven applications that need to respond in real-time to changes in data.
If you’re looking to add support for DynamoDB to your applications, then check out the DynamoDB API documentation.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) API
The Amazon S3 API is an object storage API that allows developers to store and retrieve data used by web applications, such as images, videos, and user-generated content, from Amazon’s S3 storage service.
The Simple Storage Service[5] uses buckets to store data, each bucket acting as a container for objects. In addition, the S3 API has high availability thanks to its use of cloud technology and is sometimes used to store data for backups or disaster recovery.
It’s also easy to use! Web developers can quickly create web applications that upload and download files to and from Amazon S3 web servers using this API.
