Exploring Lykdat Search with Rapid API

Temiloluwa Adebowale -

Introduction

If you build software for the web, chances are that you have used a service provided via an API. Sometimes, discovering the right API for your use case can be a hassle. That’s one of the problems that API marketplaces seek to solve.

API marketplaces have become a major part of the software development landscape, making it easier than ever to find, purchase, and use APIs to extend the capabilities of your applications. With an ever-growing selection of APIs now available on the market, developers now have unparalleled access to the data and services they need to power their applications. In this blog post, we'll take a look at what API marketplaces are, how they work, and how an API marketplace may be used to explore a sample API.

An API marketplace is exactly as described in the name. It is a platform where services are rendered and exchanged. The service in question here is APIs. It is a portal where APIs are provided and developers who have used these APIs can test the APIs, and the endpoints and see similar APIs based on the category of work they intend on doing.

We have various marketplaces that cater to API usage and accessibility for developers and business users. The following are some of the popular API marketplaces available for use:

  • Rapid API
  • APILayer
  • Zapier
  • Celigo

Exploring Lykdat Search with Rapid API

Rapid API which is the largest API marketplace in the world allows developers to search, test, and connect to tens of thousands of APIs with just one account, one API key, and one SDK also allowing for collaborations, and contributions between teams via subscriptions.

Lykdat’s API is available on Rapid API’s hub and can be found here. Below is a visual guide to using Rapid API’s hub search function to locate Lykdat’s API.

Let’s use the text search service for demonstration.

Get an API Key

A guide has been written to get an API Key from Lykdat, which can be found here. Copy the Publishable API key obtained from the dashboard to be used on Rapid API.

Testing the Endpoint

Supply your query parameter and catalog name. Running the endpoint test with the button Test Endpoint parses the parameters and data to Lykdat API using Rapid API as a proxy. This makes it easier to use Lykdat services using the intuitive interface of Rapid API.

The JSON response is presented on the right-hand side in a nicely formatted print. You can also check further details of the request and response. This includes status codes, headers, timeouts, and much more.