The best flights API - FlightStats

FlightStatus API provides information on airport and flights (even live). They recently released their new (improved) Flex API.

A lookup at ProgrammableWeb even mentioned Siri as one of it's mashup.

It is free to evaluate for 30 days. Then you could decide if you want a commercial plan. For example, it is $0.004 to check a flight status.

TelAPI - Another telephony API like Twilio

TelAPI is out of beta today.

TelAPI is like Twilio, a product for developers to easily create voice/sms apps. The features they offer is largely similar. Pricing also the same.

There is only one unique feature I see:

• Voice and audio effects

They support TwiML (Twilio proprietary XML syntax to instruct the call flow) AND also Restful web API. Cool if you don't have to know the TwiML.

Funny Gifs on API

http://apijoy.tumblr.com/ has a couple of funny Gifs on API, for both API consumers and producers. Visit for a laugh.

My favorites:

when i realize a competitor asked for an API key


what i feel when i use a REST/JSON API


When I find code samples in API documentation

Should API support Cross Site Scripting - CORS, JSONP?

One of the most requested feature for API provider would be support for CORS or JSONP.

This usually comes from client side developers using Javascript or Flash, which has a strict same origin policy (a form of security).

One of the very good guide comes from Apigee:

1.       Always make it possible for your API to return JSON.

2.       Support JSONP as much as you can (since you can't use it to upload data that doesn't fit in the URL) and leave it up to the users of your API to assess the security risks

3.       Support CORS by returning the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header on all API responses and implementing the OPTIONS verb as specified in the CORS spec.

4.       If you do the above your API will also support UMP.

5.       Return a crossdomain.xml and clientaccesspolicy.xml file from the top level of your API domain for Flash and Silverlight clients.

And looks like CORS is the trend. You could do JSONP too, but that was more of a hackaround. Youtube, Dropbox, etc are all implementing CORS.

Enable CORS!