Introduction
The PetHub API (Application Programming Interface) allows you to access the PetHub database of nearly 1-million pets1. You can use the API to build your own mobile applications, dynamic websites and connectors where PetHub acts as your back-end database. Our goal is to be the pet owner's "single source of truth" for managing their pet's data and allowing them to share their pet's data outside of PetHub in a safe and secure manner with trusted applications and services.
With the PetHub API, the goal is to allow approved developers to create, read, update and delete information on the PetHub.com site with the user's permission. For more information about our overall approach for this version 1, see our article, "PetHub Open API v1.0 -- Approach."
Using the API
The PetHub API is a RESTful API, meaning that it uses published URLs to access resources and return meaningful HTTP response codes. This enables the use of POST, GET, PUT, DELETE methods/verbs and requires proper HTTP authentication. The API supports cross-origin resource sharing allowing for secure and safe use from a client-side web application. The API is used by sending requests with a specific data structure to PetHub's servers which require authenticated access tokens for all API requests.
We've also design the APIs using an API-first, abstracted layer approach. That means we're wanting to design the APIs as developers would want to use them, not as they would to be built based on the designs of our systems. As our systems change on the back-end, there should be minimal to no impact to your use of the APIs.
Not sure where to begin? Read our Getting Started page for a high-level idea of the organization of these pages and how to put them to use based on your level of expertise. We're eager to see what you create and we're here for your ideas on additional APIs to add to further enable your vision.
1 This, of course, is only possible when a pet owner both provides that permission and continues to allow it (with the ability to modify permissions at any time including full denial of access or deletion of all data from PetHub itself).