Greetings, fellow Bubblonians!
I’ve been learning Bubble on an intermittent sporadic basis and am now wondering about the API Connector plugin.
Since you can create your own plugin to connect to an external API, what exactly is the purpose of the API connector plug-in? What are the pros and cons to using it versus creating a custom plug-in?
It’s not clear to me why one approach would be chosen over the other. Thanks for any clarification you can provide.
I can’t write code, so I can’t build a plugin. I know how APIs work, so I can use the API connector to leverage them. I imagine that’s probably the primary use case.
Hey @shot62,
The growing selection of community-built plugins you see today actually started way after the API Connector was introduced into the Bubble platform. You’re always welcome to integrate an external service through the API Connector, which has it’s own benefits like being able to make changes on a per-project basis.
Custom plugins, a means for allowing an existing application’s integrations to be used by other applications, are not required. You’ll find there are more settings and considerations for a custom plugin which you would never need with a direct implementation via API Connector, like plugin meta-data. Keep in mind that part of making a plugin for community-use is hearing about bugs and updates, so make sure you’re willing to keep up with them; it’s all part of keeping a healthy and functional community. It’s also worth noting that most of Bubble’s plugin building features offer both API events and Element plugins, which are two different types of plugins where the latter requires technical knowledge.
If you’d like to share an integration with the Bubble community that hasn’t already been shared or properly implemented, you’re free to create a custom plugin for distribution. However, if your API integration is more tailored towards your own project and you’re not interested in providing support, it’s far easier to use the API Connector to accomplish what you need and get going sooner. 
But simply connecting to an external REST API doesn’t necessitate writing code. See the Facebook plugin, for instance.
Thanks, @copilot for the very helpful response! So it seems that if you only want to interface with a REST API, then it comes down to whether or not you wish to share/publish the plugin and/or have the flexibility of using it in more than one app.
I do understand that a custom plugin allows for tighter integration or more customized functionality via Javascript code, but it seems that for data access via REST API, it comes down to “project-specific” vs “distributable”. Is that a fair assessment?
Yep, for sure. But my understanding, is that in order to build the plug-in to be used in bubble, there’s JavaScript involved. I may be mistaken, I haven’t tried because the API connector works fine for my needs
Not as far as I can tell. I did create a simple plugin that pulls data from an external service via REST API (no JS involved), and it seems all I’d have to do is publish it if I wanted to make it available to others. The fact that I could have done the same thing via the API connector is what prompted my question.
Nice! Thanks for the info
