Client App

The gist: build out a graphical interface for reading and rendering data from a public API.

Whether building a desktop app, a native app, or a web app, a really common need is being able to fetch data from an HTTP API and render that data.

Mock-Ups

To continue with the Guided By Voices discography example from the Read-Only API project, the client app would render the album details and allow the songs to be viewed. Here's a mock-up of what that could be like:

Spec

• Stand-up your GUI app
• Fetch data from the API
• Render it!

Resources

• Read-Only API project — if you built a read-only API, even one you just run locally, you could build your client app to read that data
• public-apis List on GitHub — helpful reference for similar examples

Concepts

• Consuming an HTTP API
• Data-driven UI
• Translating API data into data structures in your client language

Sub-Ideas

• An app that fetches images for a given Subreddit and allows for easy viewing, like an r/cute viewer.

Technologies of Interest

• Any web component framework like Svelte, React (Next.js in particular), Lit, Stencil, Vue, etc.
• gtk-rs for building a desktop GUI
• Flutter with Dart
• Swift for Apple platforms

Extra Credit

• Cache (store) the results locally so the application can work offline
• Make your UI handle long strings nicely, this is a common issue

See Also

• Read-Only API — building out an API that could be consumed
• API Wrapper — writing a wrapper for an API (your API if you want) to make it easier to work with