Evaluation Report Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

Evaluation Report - Coursework Example An API allows a developer’s product or service to communicate to other products and services. APIs open up data and functionality to other developers and to businesses. It allows exchange of data both internally and externally.(Jetter,2011) According to apievangelist, an API gives third party developers â€Å"firewall† access to a company’s data and resources.(apievangelist n.d) TWITTER API Twitter is an information network and communication mechanism that produces more than 200 million tweets a day. The Twitter API is largely used by majority of developers to extend twitters social experience and functionality to their own applications. Twitter offers access to its data through use of its APIs. Twitter offers products for websites that easily integrates basic twitter functions for example the tweet button. Twitter also offers a search API for developers who want to allow a user to query for twitter content. The streaming API offered by twitter provides a real ti me sample of the twitter firehose. It is for developers with data intensive needs for example a data mining project. The twitter REST API enables the developer to access core primitives of twitter including timelines status updates and user information. LINKEDIN API LinkedIn is a social network for professionals and business people. According to LinkedIn, their API enables developers to provide an easy way of enabling professionals to sign in their site using LinkedIn credentials. It also enables engagement by bringing professional content to the developer’s site. It also enables powerful conversations through its provisional groups API.(Why develop with LinkedIn, n.d) PURPOSE OF REPORT This is an evaluation report containing a critical evaluation of three third party API’s. It evaluates and discusses each and every aspect of the APIs based on standard API principles. The third API is provided to contrast with the two mentioned APIs. The report aims to find the most su itable and most efficient API from the three for better development using APIs and their integration. AUTHENTICATION Authentication is the process of identifying user provided credentials and authorizing access to an applications functionality. This is a common feature found in most applications. A huge number of users have signed up with popular web applications including Twitter and LinkedIn. Due to the problem of creating separate and multiple user credentials combination of passwords and names, developers have turned to using this functionality from the mentioned applications. These applications provide authentication API’s that make it easier for the developer to rapidly integrate the functionality in their application . The authentication API also provides for extended feature sets and secure authentication and authorization for the developers application which all in all is beneficial to everyone. Twitter provides several variations of the authentication API for develo pers through the rest API version 1.1 Authentication using the Twitter API uses the OAuth authentication styles. The developer should choose the method of authentication. Twitter offers different flavours for authentication. These include the rest API for authentication, Search API for authentication and streaming API for authentication. Each of them has specific way of implementing Twitter’s OAuth authentication(Authentication and authorization,Twitter n.d). For the OAuth signed in option the developer must obtain OAuth access token