Top 5 Fun APIs For Every Developer - With Examples

There are a lot of APIs that web developers can use. But which ones are the most fun to use? In this video I explore my top APIs that I think you should use for fun.

#api #web-development #python #javascript #nodejs

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Top 5 Mobile App Development Companies in New York

New York is the best potential business hub for the technology and IT industry. Thousands of companies are established in New York for the mobile app development or technology industry. So, here quite a confusion is that how to choose the right company for your business amongst all the companies. No need to worry about it, We have found the most reliable and trustworthy mobile app development companies that are the top-tiers in New York. Before we share the companies list you need to know the benefits of mobile app development for your business.

Key Benefits of Mobile App Development:

· Improves Efficiency

· Offers High Scalability

· Secures Your App Data

· Integrates With Existing Software

· Easy to Maintain

· Improves Customer Relationship

· Facilitates New Client Data Retrieval

· Provides Real-time Project Access

Are you looking for top mobile app development companies in New York that help to create a custom mobile app as per your business requirements? Please go through these Top 5 mobile app development companies that provide exceptional development and design services for your business.

Top Mobile App Development Companies in New York:

1. AppCluesInfotech

AppClues Infotech is one of the leading mobile app development company based in New York that builds high-quality mobile apps. Being a versatile mobile app development company, they provide services on various platforms like Android, iOS, Cross-platform, Windows, etc. They are aware of the latest technologies and features of industry. They utilize them to create a user-engaging mobile app. They have the best team of designers and developers who are delivered a mobile app with high-quality and performance.

Founded In: 2014

Employees: 50 to 200 Members

Location: USA

Website: https://www.appcluesinfotech.com/

2. Data EximIT

Data EximIT is one of the leading mobile app development company in New York that provides top-notch and elegant mobile app development services with the latest market trends and functionalities at a competitive price. They have highly experienced mobile app designers and developers team who have the best strength of developing all types of a mobile app. They deliver a feature-rich mobile app for their clients that give the best business ROI.

Founded In: 2004

Employees: 50 to 150 Members

Location: USA & India

Website: https://www.dataeximit.com/

3. WebClues Infotech

WebClues Infotech is the most reliable & superior company that builds custom mobile apps to do things differently. They are the best mobile app development company in New York, USA and as well as globally with high proficiency. They have a highly experienced app developers team that has the best strength of work on multiple platforms like android, Cross-platform, and iOS.

They have successfully delivered 950+ mobile app projects effectively and on-time. Build your Robust, Secure, Scalable & High-performance mobile app with WebClues Infotech with creative & dynamic designs at an affordable price.

Founded In: 2014

Employees: 50 to 250 Members

Location: USA, INDIA, UAE, UK & CANADA

Website: https://www.webcluesinfotech.com/

4. AppClues Studio

AppClues Studio is a leading mobile app development company in New York, USA. The company is versatile in developing custom mobile app development solutions to its customers across the globe. With an experience of 8+ years in mobile app development, Utility is hyper-focused on Return on Investment (ROI) and building good relationships with partner companies. The company is worked with a start-up to large enterprises.

Founded In: 2014

Employees: 50 to 150 Members

Location: USA & UK

Website: https://appcluesstudio.com/

5. WebClues Global

WebClues Global is a prominent mobile application development company in New York, USA. They are one of the top-tier mobile app developers who deliver high-end Android mobile app solutions to their clients. The company operated with 100+ qualified developers who working in different domains to give the best solution for their development. WebClues Global offers various services including web and mobile design & development, E-Commerce Development, Ui/Ux Development.

Founded In: 2014

Employees: 50 to 150 Members

Location: USA, INDIA, UAE, UK & CANADA

Website: https://www.webcluesglobal.com/

#top 5 mobile app development companies in new york #top 5 mobile app development companies in usa #top mobile app development companies in new york #top mobile app development companies in usa #top 5 mobile app development companies

54% of Developers Cite Lack of Documentation as the Top Obstacle to Consuming APIs

Recently, I worked with my team at Postman to field the 2020 State of the API survey and report. We’re insanely grateful to the folks who participated—more than 13,500 developers and other professionals took the survey, helping make this the largest and most comprehensive survey in the industry. (Seriously folks, thank you!) Curious what we learned? Here are a few insights in areas that you might find interesting:

API Reliability

Whether internal, external, or partner, APIs are perceived as reliable—more than half of respondents stated that APIs do not break, stop working, or materially change specification often enough to matter. Respondents choosing the “not often enough to matter” option here came in at 55.8% for internal APIs, 60.4% for external APIs, and 61.2% for partner APIs.

Obstacles to Producing APIs

When asked about the biggest obstacles to producing APIs, lack of time is by far the leading obstacle, with 52.3% of respondents listing it. Lack of knowledge (36.4%) and people (35.1%) were the next highest.

#api #rest-api #apis #api-first-development #api-report #api-documentation #api-reliability #hackernoon-top-story

A Simple Guide to API Development Tools

APIs can be as simple as 1 endpoint for use by 100s of users or as complex as the AWS APIs with 1000s of endpoints and 100s of thousands of users. Building them can mean spending a couple of hours using a low-code platform or months of work using a multitude of tools. Hosting them can be as simple as using one platform that does everything we need or as complex as setting up and managing ingress control, security, caching, failover, metrics, scaling etc.

What they all have in common are three basic steps to go from nothing to a running API.

Each of these steps has its own set of tools. Here are some I’ve used and popular alternatives.

Design

REST is the most popular API interface and has the best tooling. Our design output for REST services always includes an OpenAPI specification. The specification language can be tricky to get right in JSON (how many curly brackets?) or YAML (how many spaces?) so a good editor saves a lot of time.

Four popular ones are:

• Swagger
• Postman
• Insomnia
• Stoplight

I’ve only used Swagger and Postman but both Insomnia and Stoplight look interesting. All of them offer additional functionality like documentation, testing and collaboration so are much more than just specification generators.

#api #apis #api-development #restful-api #rest-api #development-tools #app-development-tools #developer-tools

Top 10 API Security Threats Every API Team Should Know

As more and more data is exposed via APIs either as API-first companies or for the explosion of single page apps/JAMStack, API security can no longer be an afterthought. The hard part about APIs is that it provides direct access to large amounts of data while bypassing browser precautions. Instead of worrying about SQL injection and XSS issues, you should be concerned about the bad actor who was able to paginate through all your customer records and their data.

Typical prevention mechanisms like Captchas and browser fingerprinting won’t work since APIs by design need to handle a very large number of API accesses even by a single customer. So where do you start? The first thing is to put yourself in the shoes of a hacker and then instrument your APIs to detect and block common attacks along with unknown unknowns for zero-day exploits. Some of these are on the OWASP Security API list, but not all.

Insecure pagination and resource limits

Most APIs provide access to resources that are lists of entities such as /users or /widgets. A client such as a browser would typically filter and paginate through this list to limit the number items returned to a client like so:

First Call: GET /items?skip=0&take=10 
Second Call: GET /items?skip=10&take=10

However, if that entity has any PII or other information, then a hacker could scrape that endpoint to get a dump of all entities in your database. This could be most dangerous if those entities accidently exposed PII or other sensitive information, but could also be dangerous in providing competitors or others with adoption and usage stats for your business or provide scammers with a way to get large email lists. See how Venmo data was scraped

A naive protection mechanism would be to check the take count and throw an error if greater than 100 or 1000. The problem with this is two-fold:

1. For data APIs, legitimate customers may need to fetch and sync a large number of records such as via cron jobs. Artificially small pagination limits can force your API to be very chatty decreasing overall throughput. Max limits are to ensure memory and scalability requirements are met (and prevent certain DDoS attacks), not to guarantee security.
2. This offers zero protection to a hacker that writes a simple script that sleeps a random delay between repeated accesses.

skip = 0
while True:    response = requests.post('https://api.acmeinc.com/widgets?take=10&skip=' + skip),                      headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer' + ' ' + sys.argv[1]})    print("Fetched 10 items")    sleep(randint(100,1000))    skip += 10

How to secure against pagination attacks

To secure against pagination attacks, you should track how many items of a single resource are accessed within a certain time period for each user or API key rather than just at the request level. By tracking API resource access at the user level, you can block a user or API key once they hit a threshold such as “touched 1,000,000 items in a one hour period”. This is dependent on your API use case and can even be dependent on their subscription with you. Like a Captcha, this can slow down the speed that a hacker can exploit your API, like a Captcha if they have to create a new user account manually to create a new API key.

Insecure API key generation

Most APIs are protected by some sort of API key or JWT (JSON Web Token). This provides a natural way to track and protect your API as API security tools can detect abnormal API behavior and block access to an API key automatically. However, hackers will want to outsmart these mechanisms by generating and using a large pool of API keys from a large number of users just like a web hacker would use a large pool of IP addresses to circumvent DDoS protection.

How to secure against API key pools

The easiest way to secure against these types of attacks is by requiring a human to sign up for your service and generate API keys. Bot traffic can be prevented with things like Captcha and 2-Factor Authentication. Unless there is a legitimate business case, new users who sign up for your service should not have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Instead, only trusted customers should have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Go one step further and ensure any anomaly detection for abnormal behavior is done at the user and account level, not just for each API key.

Accidental key exposure

APIs are used in a way that increases the probability credentials are leaked:

1. APIs are expected to be accessed over indefinite time periods, which increases the probability that a hacker obtains a valid API key that’s not expired. You save that API key in a server environment variable and forget about it. This is a drastic contrast to a user logging into an interactive website where the session expires after a short duration.
2. The consumer of an API has direct access to the credentials such as when debugging via Postman or CURL. It only takes a single developer to accidently copy/pastes the CURL command containing the API key into a public forum like in GitHub Issues or Stack Overflow.
3. API keys are usually bearer tokens without requiring any other identifying information. APIs cannot leverage things like one-time use tokens or 2-factor authentication.

If a key is exposed due to user error, one may think you as the API provider has any blame. However, security is all about reducing surface area and risk. Treat your customer data as if it’s your own and help them by adding guards that prevent accidental key exposure.

How to prevent accidental key exposure

The easiest way to prevent key exposure is by leveraging two tokens rather than one. A refresh token is stored as an environment variable and can only be used to generate short lived access tokens. Unlike the refresh token, these short lived tokens can access the resources, but are time limited such as in hours or days.

The customer will store the refresh token with other API keys. Then your SDK will generate access tokens on SDK init or when the last access token expires. If a CURL command gets pasted into a GitHub issue, then a hacker would need to use it within hours reducing the attack vector (unless it was the actual refresh token which is low probability)

Exposure to DDoS attacks

APIs open up entirely new business models where customers can access your API platform programmatically. However, this can make DDoS protection tricky. Most DDoS protection is designed to absorb and reject a large number of requests from bad actors during DDoS attacks but still need to let the good ones through. This requires fingerprinting the HTTP requests to check against what looks like bot traffic. This is much harder for API products as all traffic looks like bot traffic and is not coming from a browser where things like cookies are present.

Stopping DDoS attacks

The magical part about APIs is almost every access requires an API Key. If a request doesn’t have an API key, you can automatically reject it which is lightweight on your servers (Ensure authentication is short circuited very early before later middleware like request JSON parsing). So then how do you handle authenticated requests? The easiest is to leverage rate limit counters for each API key such as to handle X requests per minute and reject those above the threshold with a 429 HTTP response. There are a variety of algorithms to do this such as leaky bucket and fixed window counters.

Incorrect server security

APIs are no different than web servers when it comes to good server hygiene. Data can be leaked due to misconfigured SSL certificate or allowing non-HTTPS traffic. For modern applications, there is very little reason to accept non-HTTPS requests, but a customer could mistakenly issue a non HTTP request from their application or CURL exposing the API key. APIs do not have the protection of a browser so things like HSTS or redirect to HTTPS offer no protection.

How to ensure proper SSL

Test your SSL implementation over at Qualys SSL Test or similar tool. You should also block all non-HTTP requests which can be done within your load balancer. You should also remove any HTTP headers scrub any error messages that leak implementation details. If your API is used only by your own apps or can only be accessed server-side, then review Authoritative guide to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing for REST APIs

Incorrect caching headers

APIs provide access to dynamic data that’s scoped to each API key. Any caching implementation should have the ability to scope to an API key to prevent cross-pollution. Even if you don’t cache anything in your infrastructure, you could expose your customers to security holes. If a customer with a proxy server was using multiple API keys such as one for development and one for production, then they could see cross-pollinated data.

#api management #api security #api best practices #api providers #security analytics #api management policies #api access tokens #api access #api security risks #api access keys

Tracking a Developer’s Journey From Documentation Visit

If your business model involves selling to developers, you probably have already realized that much of the traditional processes and metrics applicable to traditional enterprise sales or consumer marketing don’t work. Specifically, selling to developers usually means attracting them to your platform and helping them succeed in building something, whether that’s a new app, integration, or automating an internal process. Getting developers to adopt your platform can be daunting and requires investment in product, onboarding and developer experience, and documentation. However, there are few tools product managers and developer relations leaders can leverage to measure and improve that experience.

Web and mobile analytics tools like Mixpanel and Amplitude can only measure activity on the website itself, yet most developer platforms price on what happens with the API, not via website activity. On the other hand, most API monitoring tools can only track infrastructure metrics like requests per minute and CPU utilization without any context of the user. To accurately measure your adoption and conversion funnel, you need to track usage across your entire platform from initial ad click and sign up, to what a new developer does with your API.

What is the developer-first marketing strategy

Most developer-first platforms have a B2D (business2developer) go to market strategy which is uniquely different from B2C companies which drive consumer adoption, but also different from B2B companies who maintain large sales forces to push their solution to other businesses. In reality, B2D sits somewhere in the middle between B2B and B2C.

B2D is like B2C in that:

• Self-service signups and credit card payments takes priority over sales demos and contract negotiation
• Low-cost acquisition channels like SEO-optimized content, SEM, and partnerships are prioritized over large and expensive sales development teams sending emails.
• Because almost everything is self-serve and online, you can be very data-driven in terms of product metrics focused over just focusing on 1:1 relationships.

B2D is also like B2B in that:

• The developer still works at a company who is buying to solve a pain rather than an individual looking for the latest gadget or online hangout spot.
• Sales processes can still be complex involving multiple stakeholders and require technical validation.
• Developers are still humans implementing a complex solution and may need high-touch dedicated support vs B2C where support is super transactional handling password resets and returns.

Building a cross-platform funnel across web and API

API product managers can focus on any number of initiatives at any given time, whether that;s API features, pricing and packaging, or top of the funnel acquisition. In order to know which area to focus, you should map out your _entire_funnel from very first ad click to a fully activated customer paying and referring other customers. The beginning of your funnel might start on your website as a visitor signs up to use your API. However, once they created an API key, much of the magic happens on the API side rather than the web side. Many developer platforms build their business model around usage-based pricing, which means your revenue is correlated to API usage, not website usage.

Funnel StageSourceDescriptionWhat to look forSigned UpWebsiteThe first step a developer makes is to show interest in your platform. For developer tools, this usually means signing up and generating an API key.Your analytics solution should be tracking which channel the user came from using UTM parameters, referrer tracking, etc along with which page drove the signup.Made first API CallAPIThis is a huge milestone as many signups never reach this stage. The developer was able to understand your API and give it a spin.Monitor TTFHW (Time to First Hello World) and conversion rate. You should continue looking at which channels drive the most activations.Made over 100 API CallsAPIAfter a 100 or so API calls, you could consider the developer “active”, in that they built a real integration rather than just testing with Postman or CurlA low conversion rate from the last step could imply difficulties with your SDK or unclear integration steps.Approaching Free LimitsAPIMost API products are priced on usage. In order to become a paying customer, they need to exceed some limit.If very few long-term “active” developers exceed their limits,then you may need to optimize your packaging and pricing.Converted to PayingWebsiteCongrats! You now have paying customers.Most developers have more than one value metric they price on. Keep an eye on which ones are driving paid conversions.Evangelized your APIWebsiteAre developers sharing and discussing your platform online?By adding a mechanism to track referrals, you can see which channels and mediums are performing the best. A complete analytics platform can track UTM parameters and things like referring domain. With a mechanism to generate unique links pere customer, you can also track which types of customers share the most.

Linking web with API activity for users and companies

Business2developer go to market models have elements of both B2C and B2B and involve both individual developers and also companies or accounts. It also involves cross-platform tracking across web and APIs. This can complicate accurate funnel and conversion reporting. Do you track an individual user sign up funnel or do you track companies who integrated and use the API? What happens if a developer clicks on an AdWord and signs up using his or her GitHub account but doesn’t do anything. If the person invited a colleague to do integration, then that person may only be attributed to “direct traffic” or “invite referral” depending on your marketing attribution. We need to still attribute the successful integration to an AdWord click.

One way to solve this is mapping out a 4x4 grid to track:

Developers active on APICompanies active on APIDevelopers active on websiteCompanies active on website

Not all API platforms will follow this model and may fill some boxes with a don’t care. For example, many APIs don’t care or track which developer is accessing the API, yet it’s important to understand which company is using the API. In this case, we want to track the following:

_Not Applicable_Companies active on APIDevelopers active on websiteCompanies active on website

Solving the cross-platform tracking

In order to solve this, analytics platforms like Moesif link everything through user ids and company ids regardless of the sessions. Your API and website should use the same identities regardless of the platform for accurate reporting. By modeling companies as groups of users, the linking can be simplified. This provides flexibility in picking and choosing whether to track usage only at the user-level, only at the company-level, or both for the API and website separately.

While having permanent identifiers are great, sometimes we don’t have all information available when the API call or user action is logged. To solve for these cases, we leverage the website session token or API key to uniquely identify the person and company. An alias table that links both session tokens to user/company ids and also API keys to user/company ids enable end to end funnel tracking.

Closing thoughts

Tracking usage and retention accurately is critical in 2020 as leadership shifts from a growth at all costs to efficient growth driven from product optimizations. You can no longer just measure vanity metrics like pageviews and signups. Instead, you should be measuring the entire funnel and understand the inputs that impact each stage. How does changes to your pricing and packaging modify your conversion rates from active developer to converted paying customer.

#api management #developer marketing #developer relations #developer experience #api adoption #developer advocacy #developer advocate #api product #api program #developer evangelism