Mashups: Creating with Web APIs

As the World Wide Web continues to grow and permeate our everyday lives, an ever-increasing amount of data and digital services are accessible to us through public web APIs - Application Programming Interfaces. Common to many web sites, including YouTube, Twitter, Google Maps, Wikipedia and more, web APIs offer a means to programmatically request and re-purpose endless troves of information. But how exactly do we access these datasets and services? How can we write code to transfer, store, and display this content on our own web sites? And how might we use these available resources to design unique, creative, and compelling web experiences of our own. This class is about creating interactive single-page web applications that leverage public data and digital services from a wide range of existing web products. The overall goal of the class will be for each student to have 3 well-designed functional single-page web applications by end of semester. Subscribing to a project-oriented approach, a majority of class time will be spent reviewing and writing code, primarily Javascript, for client-side (front-end) web development. We will use a number of Javascript libraries, including jQuery, Underscore, D3,p5, Three and more, to help build a diversity of web experiences. Where server-side (back-end) development is required, we will use the Node-Express framework. Students should have some programming experience as well as an exposure to basic client-side web development, specifically HTML and CSS. Experience with Javascript is a plus.