Most people know that Flickr has an API. As it wouldn’t be much use without documentation, we have that, too. (There’s even a list of methods and information about each available via the API itself.) What if I told you there was also a way to experiment with it from the comfort of your browser, no coding required?
Well, that’s what Flickr’s API Explorer offers. It’s an easy way to customise requests by filling in simple form fields, whether the method requires authentication or not, and to see the responses that are returned. It’s great for one-off prototype scripts where you quickly want to find some data, for seeing whether a method does what you think it does, or to sanity-check some code that’s not doing the right thing.
It’s been around for years, but nobody ever seems to have made much of a fuss about it. (The only mention I can find on this blog is an interview with a certain API developer singing its praises.) However, it’s needed a little attention to bring it up to date, and so I made some time to teach it a few new tricks.
Firstly, it now offers a choice of output response. While it doesn’t offer every format that the API does, the three (and a bit) available – the default XML, JSONP (or raw JSON), and PHP serialized data – should cover a lot of ground. Secondly, the Explorer pages now have proper URLs, so it’s possible to link to the API method for fetching the list of pandas, for example. Finally, for the most popular of those response types – XML and JSON(P) – responses are now pretty-printed and syntax highlighted, as are the examples in the API documentation pages for each method. That is to say, the returned values are indented and have line breaks, while the name, attributes and quoted values of the elements are coloured appropriately.
Now that you know that it exists, and that it’s all freshened up with spiffy features, why not go and play around? Have fun!