Finding the JSON file

Hi Derek,

Generally sites don't just have a JSON file sitting around, they will have an API running in the background that allows you to define the data return type of application/json as part of the response headers, as an example lets takes Flickr's photo API.

https://www.flickr.com/services/api/response.json.html

In the documentation it shows you can make the requests as either raw JSON or JSONp which is derived from JSON but allows you to execute as a callback but I won't go into that, so for example take the following URL.

https://www.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.test.echo&format=json&nojsoncallback=1&api_key=46b92b9b29613407e51c86aa4c047fea

In here we have the following.

• format=json
• nojsoncallback=1

The format parameter tells flickr we want a JSON type response for the data and the nojsoncallback parameter says we just want raw JSON as this isn't a JSONp request.

Hopefully that helps, it may be a bit confusing if you're new to the concept of an API but there are literally thousands of websites they have one if they are of a 3rd party service such as Facebook and Twitter.