19 Groundbreaking APIs

Tam Hanna takes the guesswork out of which APIs to use and helps you discover how to add innovative features to your sites with these powerful plugins from Apple, Google, Mozilla and more!

- Tam Hanna

APIs are an invaluable tool for developers, as they let your sites and web apps stand on the shoulders of giants. They enable you to focus on unique application logic, instead of having to hack together plumbing from scratch. Not only that but big players like Google, Apple, Facebook and Mozilla are increasingly allowing developers to make use of their most innovative IP to plug in fantastic functionality into their projects. Here’s our guide to some of our favourite and most innovative APIs.

GOOGLE

In a move which should surprise no one, Google lays claim to a sizeable chunk of land in the API universe. Here are a few especially interesting offers from Big G

1 Cloud Machine Learning Engine API

https://cloud.google.com/ml-engine/

Speaking nontechnically, machine learning is a process taking input fields and then mapping them to a number of outputs. A classic application is turbine data, which is used to determine failure probabilities.

While machine-learning algorithms can be posted on any computer able to run Python, the amount of resources you need rises significantly the larger the involved data sets get. As can be inferred from the other APIs highlighted in this feature, Google has experience handling all kinds of machine learning-related jobs.

As a result, floating the job to Big G’s servers is a convenient way to solve the problem. In addition to removing the CPU burden from your machines, offloading the machine-learning payloads also improves the learning speed – due to the large amount of iterations it can run, the company has been able to greatly accelerate the normally tedious machine-learning process.