Behind almost every successful web application, there is an easy-to-use & feature-rich API as they simply help the main application to spread into others & reached by more users.

Also, an API-enabled application can be easily developed further using the API itself.

In order to create an API for your web application, here are 10 tutorials to get you started. But before that, you may want to checkout the video: How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters by Google.

PHP

Create a REST API with PHP

A very detailed yet easy-to-implement tutorial on creating a REST API with PHP.

And, there is a follow-up article: "Making RESTful Requests in PHP" by the same author which can guide you as well.

How to Add an API to your Web Service (PHP)

A detailed tutorial which describes the concepts like REST, SOAP & creates an API step-by-step with PHP.

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Ruby on Rails is a powerful web framework that helps creating web applications easier, faster & writing an organized code.

There are lots of websites that use it including popular ones like Twitter, Basecamp, AboutUs & many more.

Also, Ruby on Rails powers some amazing open source web applications which you may want to use directly or improve further.

Here is a well-categorized 23 open source Ruby on Rails applications:

(Note: There are few Merb apps. in the list too which we believe is ok considering Rails & Merb are getting into the same package with Rails 3.)

Project, Task & Time Management

Notes

Notes is an easy to use to-do-list & notes manager application.

It is possible to create pages & make them public (if wanted) or create simple notes. With the Jabber listener support, you can eevn add new notes from your Google Talk by chatting with a bot.

Reminders can be set for each note that can be sent to you by e-mail or SMS (via a Twitter bridge).

Tracks

A to-do-list manager with a clean interface. Tracks lets you to categorize, prioritize, schedule & star items for a better usability (see WRD post).

Interface is Ajaxed & many tasks are done by drag’n drops. The application has multi-user support & comes with a built-in web-server for user who want to install it to their computers.

ClockingIT

It allows keeping track of all your tasks and the time you spend on them. With just a click, the timer can be started (see WRD post).

But not only that. There is a built-in project management system with milestones, reports & tasks.

ClockingIT tracks/logs every change to the documents & can send notifications via e-mail, RSS or iCal.

It is normally a free hosted application & source can be found here.

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Tracks is a web based, advanced & open source to-do-list (getting things done) application built with Ruby on Rails.

It comes with a built-in web server (WEbrick) which makes it easier to run on your own computer or it can be installed to any Ruby on Rails enabled web server.

Application has a very slick interface & offers a high usability with drag’n drops & Ajaxed actions.

Tracks is a multi-user to-do-list application where everyone can have their own tasks.

Items can be categorized, proritized, scheduled & starred (for reaching them easier).

With a chart-supported statistics page, you can see the progress of your tasks, analyze them better like finding out which are your productive days, which task took more then expected & more.

The application has a powerful feed support (text, iCal and RSS). You can subscribe to a list & get status updates for them.

Tracks also makes it possible to getting integrated with other apps. with its API. And, it provides a lightweight interface for mobile phones at  http://tarcksurl/mobile/.

Panda is an open source solution that handles uploading, encoding & streaming videos.

All the process is completed via an elegant REST API.

Panda is designed to run in the cloud using Amazon’s array of web services.

The application runs on a customised EC2 instance with everything pre-installed, including FFmpeg and an plethora of codecs.

SimpleDB is used to store all of data for video, encoding, accounts and encoding profiles. Uploaded and encoded video files are then stored on S3.

Other features of Panda:

• Everything contained within one elegant Merb application.
• Support for FLV, h264 for Flash, iPhone formats & more.
• Panda gem for painless integration with Ruby on Rails and Merb.
• Lovely little admin dashboard for managing your videos.

By default, Panda uses the JW FLV player but you can switch to any other video player easily.

SproutCore is a framework for building applications in JavaScript with remarkably little amounts of code.

It can help you build full “thick” client applications in the web browser that can create and modify data, often completely independent of your web server, communicating with your server via Ajax only when they need to save or load data.

Like other JavaScript frameworks, SproutCore has ready to use visual widgets like list views, button views, and forms. But it also has other functions such as an in-memory database (that can integrate with client-side offline storage), bindings, property observing, and controllers.

SproutCore uses Ruby to generate static HTML and JavaScript files, you are not tied to Ruby or Rails in production. SproutCore runs in the browser, your production system can use whatever backend you want

ClockingIT is an open source task – time tracking & project management application (normall a free hosted app. & source code is available) built with Ruby on Rails.

With a slick Ajaxed interface and providing information in every step of creating projects or tasks, ClockingIT is a very user-friendly application.

It is a complete solution for managing projects within a team as it offers nice tools like an integrated wiki, forum & a Facebook-like chat within team members.

Features of this free Ruby on Rails application:

• no restrictions or limits
• time tracking & reports
• milestones & due dates
• tagging & search
• timeline & activity log
• notifications, rss & iCal
• integrated wiki, forum & chat
• multilanguage

Community Engine is a free, open-source social network plugin for Ruby on Rails applications. Drop it into your new or existing application, and you’ll instantly have all the features of a basic community site.

Features of this social network plugin:

• Authentication (sign up, log in)
• User profiles
• User search
• Blogs with tagging, categories and rich text editing
• Photo uploading and tagging
• “Clippings” – visual bookmarks
• Commenting and comment notification by e-mail (Blogs, profiles, photos, and clippings can be commented)
• Forums
• Friendships and activity feeds
• Favoriting of clippings and blog posts
• And more!

Snipplr is a website where you can store / share your code snippets and find the ones that are already shared by other users.

It is great to find real-world working code examples with an organized interface which saves a lot of time.

Snipplr covers almost every language from ASP, ASP.NET, PHP to Ruby, Django or AS3.

A feature I like is seeing the codes shared by a specific user (nice feature for following users whose coding style is much familiar to you).

Snipplr is absolutely a must-bookmark for a developer.

It is a time consuming process to create an admin interface with standard functions such as add-edit-delete-update again and again.

ActiveScaffold, a Ruby On Rails plugin handles all the ActiveRecords smartly. It adds add-edit-delete-update functionality with an Ajaxed interface & sorting, searching and pagination support.

ActiveScaffold features:

• AJAXified table interface for creating, updating, and deleting objects
• Automatic handling of ActiveRecord associations
• Sorting, Search and Pagination
• Graceful JavaScript degradation
• RESTful API support (XML/YAML/JSON)
• Sexy CSS styling and theming support
• More extension points than you can shake a stick at
• Guaranteed to work on Firefox 1+, IE 6+ and Safari 2+
• Released under the MIT License, the same one as Rails itself, so you can use it freely in your commercial applications.

Datetime Toolbocks is a JavaScript library with advanced date parsing that generates date data from the text passed. A simple example would be "today", "next friday", or "last monday".

This smart date parsing JavaScript library also has a DHTML based date selector which makes the library vey functional for users who would prefer text or visual input selection.

DateTime Toolbocks currently supports Ruby on Rails as the development platform.