I'm currently doing an investigation into the use of APIs with mobile and web applications and I've recently stumbled across something called Representational State Transfer (REST).
It seems that MSDN Bing API documents this quite well, but Google Maps API doesn't.
Does anyone know if this interface is just used by Bing or could it be implemented with the use of Google Maps API as well?
You can find Google Maps API documentation at this link, but it only describes how to interface with the API in order to use the Maps service;
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/webservices/
Related
I'm using the Flutter Geocoding Plugin library,
https://pub.dev/packages/geocoding
I'm just confused by the Geocoding APi that is on the google map service here:
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/
is it the same? and is it paid?
According to the home page of the plugin Geocoding of baseflow.com
Important:
This plugin uses the free Geocoding services provided by the iOS and
Android platforms. This means that there are restrictions to their
use. More information can be found in the Apple documentation for iOS
and the Google documentation for Android.
The availability of the Google Play Services depends on your country.
If your country doesn't support a connection with the Google Play
Services, you'll need to try a VPN to establish a connection. For more
information about how to work with Google Play Services visit the
following link: https://developers.google.com/android/guides/overview
And the Before you begin section of the Google Maps API got this
Before you start developing with the Geocoding API, review the
authentication requirements (you need an API key) and the API usage
and billing information (you need to enable billing on your project).
So by conclusion, the first is free and the second ain't!
I have a question, searching a local business on Bing maps results in detail information about the business for instance its phone, url and hours of operations. I didn't find a way to get similar attributes (phone, url, hours of operations etc) by Bing maps API. My question is it just me, who is unable to find a way to extract such info or there is no way (through Bing maps API)?
This is to be expected. The Bing Maps website is just like any other company that uses the Bing Maps API's. They use the API's to provide mapping functionality and then add their custom functionality on top. A lot of the rich business listing data that you see on the Bing Maps website is sourced from other companies such as Yelp, Four Square or Trip advisor, but they only allow the Bing Maps to use this data in their 1st party apps (i.e. Bing Maps website) and not in the developer API's as these companies already have developer API's. This is the primary reason why you will see more data on the Bing Maps website than you will in the API. You will find that this is also the case with Google Maps as well.
I see everywhere that google plus api is readonly. But i saw this app screenshot.
How did they do then? Even the docs say its read only.
The API is indeed still read-only. We worked directly with SXSW on this year's mobile app to enable sharing... it's not a feature that is generally available at this time.
The note at the top of the REST API documentation page seems to answer both questions at once:
Note: The Google+ API currently provides read-only access to public
data. All API calls require either an OAuth 2.0 token or an API key.
I have a Google API console premier account, and I'm using the places service for an application that has two parts, web app and mobile app.
It seems that Google API distinguishes between server and browser apps. So for each category I have to generate keys specifically for it.
The mobile app is a native iPhone App, that uses the Google Places Web Services XML API for a simple auto complete function.
The question is in which category does mobile apps fall in?
Browser Apps
Server Apps
And any resources of how to use them?, does the Google JavaScript API V3 still requires an API Key for the premium users? Google documentation about this subject does not have enough information.
There are two different interactive types of Mobile Apps that use Google Maps:
ones that use the Maps Javascript API v3 (either directly or embedded in a Native Application)
ones that use Native Google Maps APIs (currently available for Android and iPhone)
For more on that you can have a look at:
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/articles/mobile_overview_v3.html
Ones that use the Maps JS v3 are Browser Apps, the Native Apps are neither. They have their own TOS and quota system, like the one for iPhone and the one for Android.
About Google Maps JS API v3. It an be loaded :
without any key
with an API console key, which will allow you to track your usage (this was introduced recently)
with Maps Premier client id (gme-) if you are a Maps API Premier customer
The XML web service for places API should be used only as a server side solution. This is because you can imagine that a user might steal your key from the source of your iPhone app (by sniffing on the traffic) and use it.
The safe way out is to use a proxy server. You would then register an App Key for server apps (with IP locking for your proxy server) and then make calls to the Places API from this proxy.
Another option would be to use UIWebView on the iPhone side with JS Maps API v3 and Places library on the Google side. You would then fall in "ones that use the Maps Javascript API v3 in a Native Application" category.
You could then use any of the 3 options to load JS Maps API that are mentioned above.
I had to cut away some links, since I am not able to paste more than two, but I hope that helps anyway
Unless you have strong reasons against it, the "ones that use the Maps Javascript API v3 in a Native Application" category is the best option. There's a nice talk from Google I/O 2010 about it: http://www.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions/map-once-map-anywhere-geospatial-apps.html
I see there are numerous examples to access the Dropbox service by its SDK. I need use RESTful API to access both Dropbox and another service provider which is similar as Dropbox but doesn't provide an SDK. So I plan to encapsulate a unified interface.
But Dropbox's website https://www.dropbox.com/developers/docs has no clear flow to describe how to use a pure RESTful API to do what SDK does. I'm curious if some sample code did that?
Please see the official documentation:
https://www.dropbox.com/developers-v1/core/docs
Note that the above link is to the old and deprecated v1 API.
Here's the HTTP API docs for the current v2 API: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation/http/documentation
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/385431/Android-RESTful-OAuth-upload-file-to-Dropbox#_rating
Its all there