This is part four in a series* on using web APIs to accomplish useful things in a PicoStack web application.
We have talked about consuming web APIs in a read-only fashion, safeguarding web API secrets when they are required, and wrapping the complexity of an API in a ruleset used as a module.
In this post, we'll use all of these techniques and demonstrate how to use a web API to send simple text email messages.
When using a web API it can be nice to have a wrapper around the various HTTP requests that can be made.
On the plus side, this allows for a separation of concerns. Your code doesn't need to get into the details of making the HTTP requests.
Often, the provider of the web API also supplies wrappers for various popular programming languages. Some, like TMDb (used in the previous post) accept wrappers from their developers and list them for use by other developers.
In the previous post, we consumed a web API which was provided freely (which we called "public") in that it didn't need to know who we were. Most web APIs require consumers to identify themselves, and do this by giving out an API key and/or client secret.
The identifiers we will obtain from an API provider are intended for our use only, and we are responsible for that usage. In this post, we'll show a couple of ways to keep them secret while we consume such APIs.
There are countless thousands of APIs provided on the web. Fifteen percent of them are public*. A web application can consume private ones once you have signed up with the owner of the API and been given client API keys and secrets.
Either way, PicoStack is an easy way to consume these APIs.
In this post, we'll walk through using one particular public API, which provides information about events held at Brigham Young University (BYU).
