This is my online domain where I work to understand the world of the Application Programming Interfaces, also known as APIs. This new way of sharing data using the web is touching almost every aspect of our increasingly digital lives, providing access to the bits and bytes that make our personal and professional worlds go round.

This is my research specifically how embeddable tooling is developed on top of APIs, allowing the publishing and syndication of buttons, badges, widgets, and other tooling around the web, in mobile applications, as well as directly on-device.

API Evangelist is a network of data driven projects and APIs which I curate and manage as part of this ongoing research, hoping to provide easy access to the moving parts of my work. Everything you see here runs on Github, making everything forkable, and reusable for both humans and machines.

I am setting up Stripe for a client, and I found myself browsing through Stripe Elements, and the examples they have published to Github. If you aren’t familiar, “Stripe Elements are pre-built rich UI components that help you build your own pixel-perfect checkout flows across desktop and mobile.” I put Stripe Elements into my bucket of API embeddables, which overlaps with my API SDK research, but because they are JavaScript open up a whole new world of possibilities for developers and non-developers, I keep separate.

Stripe.js and supporting elements provides a robust set of solutions for integrating the Stripe API into your website, web or mobile application. You can choose the pre-made element, customize as you see fit, or custom build your own using the Stripe.js SDK. It provides a great place to start when learning about Stripe, reverse engineering some existing solutions, and figuring out what integration will ultimately look like. In my scenario, the default Stripe element in their documentation works just fine for me, but I couldn’t help but playing with some of the others just to see what is possible.

You can tell Stripe has invest A LOT into their Sripe.js SDK, and the overall user experience around it. It provides a great example of how far you can go with embeddable API solutions. I like that they have the Stripe Elements published to Github, and available in six different languages. As I was learning and Googling, I came across other examples of Stripe.js deployment on other 3rd party sites, making me think it would be nice if Stripe had a user generated elements gallery as part of their offering, accepting pull requests from developers in the Stripe community. It wouldn’t be that hard to come up with a template markdown page that developers could fill out and submit, sharing their unique approach to publishing Stripe Elements.

Having a Github repository to display example embeddable API tooling makes sense, and is something I’ll add to my embeddable research. While not all SDKs warrant having their own Github repository, I’d say that embeddable JavaScript SDKs rise to the occasion, and when they are as robust as Stripe Elements might benefit from their own landing page, and forkable, continuously integratable elements. Actually, on second thought, in a CI/CD world I’m feeling like ALL API SDKs should have their own repository, opening up the possibility for them to have their own landing page, issues, and code in a separate repo, for easier integration. I’m going to do a round-up of Stripe’s embeddable efforts, as well as the other SDKs they support, and see what other examples I can extract for other API providers to consider as they pull together their approach to supporting the intersection of embeddable and SDK.

• Read The Blog

• Embed Engines
  • Widget Builder - A widget builder provides a form that API consumers can use to configure a predefined widget that is integrated with an API, allowing them to customize and tailor the widget experience.
  • JavaScript API - A complete JavaScript API that developers can use to build and manage their own JavaScript integrations with an APIs resources, beyond existing widgets.
• Embed Formats
  • Open Graph Protocol - The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph, by embedding of simple tags in the pages header that describe objects.
  • oEmbed - Format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource.
• Embeddable Tools
  • Widgets - Widgets are highly functional, API is driven​ JavaScript tools that provide portable applications that can be embedded on any website or application.
  • Buttons - Buttons are shareable snippets of code that often share, syndicate or trigger a variety of events that use APIs as their source.
  • Badges - Badges are common for displaying content and resources delivered via an API and allow these assets to be embedded on any website or application.
  • Bookmarklet - A bookmarklet that can be added to the toolbar of a browser, and quickly push data to an API.
  • Login Button - Providing a single click button for logging into system.
  • Intents - providing the ability to easily make a single, or orchestrate several API calls -- fulfilling a single intent.
• Overview
  • Language Support - Providing support for multiple languages across embeddable elements.
  • CSS Control - Providing support over CSS elements for embeddable elements.
  • Analytics - Providing analytics as part of the embeddable tooling operations.

These building blocks are constantly being added to and reorganized. If there is something you think should be here feel free to let me know. Remember that this represents my living research, and will evolve, expand and actually seed new research areas as I find the time to pay attention to API testing.

As I keep an eye on the space I curate news, bookmark organizations, watch interesting tools, and work to understand what deployment solutions are being applied by leading API providers. I take everything I find and publish here as part of my research.

I then take this research, and what I've learned and publish stories on the blog, and more long form content like my industry guides, and white papers for customers. This is one way that I generate revenue to keep it all going.

If you'd like to see me focus more on API embeddables I could use more partners investing in this area, helping me find the time to study more about what is going on. Feel free to contact me directly if you want to talk more about API embeddables.

Thanks for your support!