Having access to the internet means having information at your fingertips. The world wide web offers a plethora of information to users around the globe. What happens behind the scenes of these sites usually goes unrecognized by the user, but is very involved for the web developer. To make things easy on those providing pathways for the millions of browsers, APIs (Application Programming Interface) were created.
An API is "a set of functions and procedures allowing the creation of applications that access the features or data of an operating system, application, or other service." *1 They are hidden web objects that hold information for web developers to pull data from.
This site utilizes Open Weather to gather an assortment of weather data based on the user's choice of city, and the ajax function to decipher it. It not only displays the current weather, but it dynamically displays the UV index, and how severe it is for the day. It also gives a five day forecast. Lastly, it uses local storage to save the users searched city, so that if they revisit the site, the previous weather and searches are still visible.
With web APIs, the ability to manipulate data to create dynamic and user friendly web pages is easier than ever. The accessibility does not end with weather either, as there are APIs for all assortments of data across the internet.
Andrew Kleiner
*1 Oxford Languages via Google
