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 have been studying JSON Home, trying to understand how it sizes up to APIs.json, and other formats I’m tracking on like Pivio. JSON Home has a number of interesting features, and I thought one of their examples was also interesting, and was relevant to my API embeddable research. In this example, JSON Home was describing a widget that was putting an API to use as part of its operation.

Here is the snippet from the JSON Home example, providing all details of how it works:

JSON Home seems very action oriented. Everything about the format leads you towards taking some sort of API driven action, something that makes a lot of sense when it comes to widgets and other embeddables. I could see JSON Home being used as some sort of definition for button or widget generation and building tooling, providing a machine readable definition for the embeddable tool, and what is possible with the API(s) behind.

I’ve been working towards embeddable directories and API stacks using APIs.json, providing distributed and embeddable tooling that API providers and consumers can publish anywhere. I will be spending more time thinking about how this world of API discovery can overlap with the world of API embeddables, providing not just a directory of buttons, badges, and widgets, but one that describes what is possible when you engage with any embeddable tool. I’m beginning to see JSON Home similar to how I see Postman Collections, something that is closer to runtime, or at least deploy time. Where APIs.json is much more about indexing, search, and discovery–maybe some detail about where the widgets are, or maybe more detail about what embeddable resources are available.

• 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!