APIs are a fundamental part of the web, and there are countless APIs providing access to all kinds of data for web applications.
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, 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
In the previous guide, we discussed ten Web projects that use APIs, and this guide will cover some more exciting projects. Every project mentioned in this guide includes a deployed demo and a complete how-to-build guide. 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. Every app has a detailed guide that demonstrates how to build it, which will help you get started right away.
RapidAPI Hub
All 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. Weather App
In this project, we used the Open Weather Map API, which provides updated data regarding weather data for any location on earth. The weather data is based on data from more than 40,000 weather stations. So, the web application will allow users to search for the current weather in any city.
You can also try the live application and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.
2. Currency Converter
In this project, we used the Currency Conversion and Exchange Rates API, which offers current and historical foreign currency exchange rates. So, we will build a web application that will let users convert any currency to another according to the latest exchange rate.
You can also try the live application and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.
3. QR Code Generator
In this project, we will be building an application that generates QR Codes for any text input. QR codes allow you to share information quickly and seamlessly. They are used everywhere, from payment portals to social apps like Snapchat and WhatsApp. We used the qrcode utils API, which converts any input into a QR Code.
You can also try the live application and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.
4. Trademark Search App
In this project, we used the USPTO Trademark API to build a web application that will allow users to look up trademarks and check the availability of a trademark keyword.
You can also try the live application and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.
5. Random Facts App
There are so many absurd things and facts that exist in this world. In this fun project, we used the Random Facts API to build a web application that will display random interesting facts to the user.
You can also try the live application and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.
6. Topic Keyword Generator
Most of us have written a blog and article at least once in life. When you have to publish a blog, you have to enter keywords and topics to rank your article on Google and other search engines.
In this project, we will build an application around this use case using the Topic Tagging API. The app will allow you to paste your article and generate topics and keywords for it.
You can also try the live application and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.
7. Carbon Footprint App
In this project, we will use the CarbonFootprint API, which provides carbon footprint numbers of different activities. The web application will allow users to get carbon footprint data of their travel.
You can also try the live application and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.
8. Horoscope App
If you are someone who is interested in finding horoscope predictions, you can build your own web application for it! You can use the Aztro API to create the app.
You can also try the live application and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.
9. News App
In this project, we will build a news application using the AI-powered Bing News Search API, which is an API by Microsoft that fetches the latest news using the Bing Search.
You can also try the live application and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.
10. Famous Quotes App
This is another fun project that uses the Famous Quotes API for our web application that will show a famous random quote every time. It is a great project to get started with APIs.
You can also try the live application and find its source code on the RapidAPI Examples Repository GitHub.