Google Launches API to Discover Google APIs

Google offers a big number of APIs which enable third-party developers to access Google services, products and features. And now it's launching an API which enables developers to discover what Google APIs are available also get more info on them.

It's all very 'meta' but it makes sense for some type of applications. Google believes the new Google APIs Discovery Service could be very useful for IDE Plugins and client libraries.

"As announced at last Google I/O, the new family of Google APIs client libraries runs on top of a brand new API infrastructure, which allows Google to reduce the amount of work needed to release and maintain the client libraries," Google wrote.

"This is done through a simple API that provides machine readable descriptions of Google APIs that the client libraries take advantage of," it explained.

"Today, we are announcing the Google APIs Discovery Service, which is the secret sauce behind the new client libraries. This service exposes machine readable metadata about Google APIs," it announced.

The discovery API enables developers to access a several types of information. For one, it retrieves a list of all existing and available Google APIs.

For each API, the discovery service also makes available a list of API resource schemas, a list of API methods and their parameters and a list of OAuth 2.0 scopes available for each.

Finally, developers can retrieve inline documentation for methods, their parameters and the values these parameters can take.

Google uses the very same API for its purposes, including the client libraries for each API and the Google Plugin for Eclipse. Google also built Google APIs Explorer on top of the Google APIs Discovery Service and is now open the source code for the app.

The APIs Explorer not only lists all available APIs for each developer as well as their methods, but it also provides an example of how to use the Discovery Service in an application.