APIs You Didn’t Know Already Exist

Benjamin J. Balter

• @BenBalter
• Ben.Balter.com

* Hey, I’m an API!

About Me

• Presidential Innovation Fellow working on Project MyGov
• Digital Strategy within Office of the US Chief Information Officer
• Business Process Automation on White House SoftWare Automation and Technology (SWAT) Team
• New Media at the Federal Communications Commission

* Views are my own

Have a CSV?

• CSV to API
• Requires Standard LAMP stack (PHP)
• Point it at any public CSV
• RESTful API as HTML, XML, JSON, JSONP
• Sort by Field
• Filter by Field

Have a Database?

• DB to API
• Requires Standard LAMP stack (PHP)
• MySQL, MS SQL Server, ODBC, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite, etc.
• Automagically generates RESTful API
• All rows in a table, Specific row in a table, All rows matching a query
• Returns data in HTML, XML, JSON, JSONP

Have Text?

• GitHub
• Extremely detailed “diffs” of each change
• Example: Simple’s Financial Policies
• Draft as Markdown or HTML
• Publish as GitHub Pages (Bootsrap)
• Encourage Collaboration as Prose (simply replace github.com/ with prose.io# in edit URL)