APIs are a fundamental part of the web, and there are countless APIs providing access to all kinds of data for web applications. You can use APIs to build a variety of exciting web applications as your side projects.
The best way to learn web development and coding, in general, is by building projects to apply your knowledge. Today web applications are centered around the APIs they consume. Moreover, on the enterprise level, APIs are often designed before creating applications for different platforms.
Therefore, learning how to interact with APIs, send requests, handle their response, and manage errors are critical aspects of web development's learning curve. Before moving further, let's revise our concepts about APIs.
API
The Application Programming Interface (API) is like a middle man, connecting two sides; a waiter takes your order and brings you food. It is a channel that applications utilize to talk with each other. You put some information at one end, and the API takes that information and gets back with a result.
An API lets one application use the capabilities of another system. This means that if you want to build an e-commerce application, you can concentrate on building only your product. You can use the API of different applications for payments, billings, authentication, etc.
Projects
This guide will cover some exciting Web projects that use APIs, and every project includes a demo and a Learn how to build. You can use these project ideas to improve your skills and showcase them in your developer portfolio.
This guide will present ten excellent web apps that use different APIs for data fetching. These examples use APIs to make applications that serve real use-cases. Moreover, every project has a detailed guide that demonstrates how to build it, which will help you get started right away.
RapidAPI Hub
These examples use APIs from RapidAPI Hub, the largest API marketplace which enables you to choose from thousands of public APIs for use in your projects.
1. Random Collor Palette Generator
Random color palettes are a great source of inspiration if you are looking for colors for your design projects. We built a web application around this use case using the Random Palette Generator API. The application generates and displays random color palettes to its visitors.
You can also try the live app demo and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.
2. NFT Explorer
Web 3.0 is growing rapidly. There are many APIs on RapidAPI Hub that make Web 3.0 more accessible. NFTs are also one of the Web 3.0 items. So, we used an API to build an NFT explorer application in Next.js. In this project, we used the NFT Explorer API, that allows us to search for NFT collections from 20+ networks.
You can also try the live NFT App and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.
3. Text Summarizer
Sometimes, too long text can cause information overload, and we may want to summarize it. So, we built building a web application that allows users to get a concise, easy-to-digest version of any given text without missing any critical information. We used the TLDRThis API for the text summarization features.
You can also try the live application and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.
4. Anime Suggestion App
We often want to watch animes similar to what we have already watched. It can become a hassle looking up these animes on the internet. Fortunately, we can build an app for it. In this project, we used the Anime Recommender API to create a web application that will recommend animes to you based on your search
You can also try the live application and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.
5. Hashtag Generator
In this project, we will be building a web application that will allow users to generate the best-performing hashtags for a given keyword. It will analyze the keyword and find the relevant hashtags. We will rely on the Hashtagy - Generate Hashtags API that generates social media hashtags using custom algorithms, so let's build the app.
You can also try the live application and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.
6. Text Case App
If you are a programmer, you would know how many letter cases exist that you can use to declare your variables. There is the camel case, pascal case, kebab case, etc. In this project, let's build a text case converter that will convert whole pieces of text into different letter cases. We can use the ConvertText API for this purpose.
You can also try the live application and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.
7. Spam Checker
The Spam Check API on RapidAPI Hub allows us to check any text content for spam. You can use it for multiple reasons, such as before sending emails to ensure they don't land in the spam folder. So we can build an application that allows users to check any text content for spammy words/phrases and provide its spam score.
You can also try the live application and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.
8. Sentence Generator
In this project, let's build a sentence generator that will take a few words like subject, object, and verb and then generate a sentence using them. We can use the Linguatools Sentence Generating API for generating sentences for a given input.
You can also try the live application and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.
9. Custom News App
The world is changing every day, and it is hard to keep up with all the news. Instead of looking up on the internet, we can build a small app to get the top news in one place. So, we used the Web Search API to create a custom news app that will provide the users with top news results based on their query.
You can also try the live application and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.
10. Book Search App
This project uses the HAPI Books API to create a Next.js web application that fetches the author, description, cover image, links, and more of a required book.
You can also try the live application and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.