Enhance your sites by making the most of the newest and best JavaScript APIs.
Here’s our pick of the best JavaScript APIs around right now, plus a guide to getting started using them. These will help you add new and interesting functionality to your sites and apps. A word of warning: many of these APIs are still in development, so make sure you check browser support before you start using them, and provide fallbacks where necessary.
For more awesome plugins to explore, take a look at our guides to the best HTML APIs and Google APIs.
- 01. Modify browser settings
- Read more: Mozilla summary
While the browser usually is ‘above’ any code running in it, a Mozilla-derived API allows JavaScript limited access to browser settings. Think about aspects such as reading the user’s homepage, how bookmarks are handled, and where new tabs show up.
02. File APIs
- Read more: W3C summary
Handling large amounts of persistent data always was a bit of a problem for web apps. The W3C file API combines some of the concepts used by various vendors — please do keep in mind that full filesystem access is usually not granted, mostly for security reasons.
03. Microsoft Cognitive services
- Read more: Microsoft summary
Artificial intelligence requires extreme amounts of training data — logically, vendors are not motivated to provide these models to their customers. Instead, developers are allowed to send payloads to a server, which is then analysed on-line.
While all of the large cloud vendors offer more or less sophisticated artificial intelligence services, Microsoft stands out by its focus on AI features. The API offers are subsumed under the term cognitive services; you can access features such as advanced image recognition services. For example, the snapshot accompanying this box shows the AI being used to recognize Microsoft’s CEO from a press photo — other features are related to video, handwriting and sound recognition and transcription.
While the quality of output usually is very high, do keep in mind that continued usage is all but cheap — as time goes by, usage charges can and do add up.
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