In this modern web-world, API’s are being used extensively for a variety of purposes as the API allows programmers to use predefined functions to interact with the remote script (on a remote server) to do a variety of things, intead of writing them from scratch. Today you’ll learn about the basic purpose and concept of APIs.
INTRODUCTION
- API or an Application-Programming Interface is a set of data structures, programming instructions and standards, protocols, routines and tools for accessing a web-based software application or a predefined function on an Operating System (OS).
- There are two types of API’s; the Operating System ones which let the software developers use the predefined functions & the one’s that website’s offer like Twitter.
- API’s can be programmed in any language and they can be used in any language.
- An API is a software-to-software interface, not a user interface.
- With APIs, applications talk to each other without any user knowledge or intervention.
- As a user you only see one interface but behind the scenes, many web applications and APIs are working together to provide you top-notch services.
PURPOSE
API’s can serve for a variety of purposes:
- Without actually going to (browsing through) a site, you can actually post to it.
- More control over what to post
- Easy to use and implement.
- Increasing the importance of an online application.
- Saving bandwidth (if you use your application then you can modify it as you want)
EXAMPLES
You might not even know but I am 100% sure that you have probably used an API using application (indirectly) before like:
- For posting to Twitter/Facebook, applications like TweetDeck, TwitterFeed, the Facebook chat applications available use API’s as they are internally connecting to the respective websites and then helping you post updates or chat to your friends.
- Domain selling services like GoDaddy use the Paypal API to take your payments and then redirect you back to your GoDaddy’s account.
There are many more real-life examples of API’s and APIGuides.com will help you to build applications using those robust API’s available out there.