APIs in 2 minutes for Developers and Non-Developers
API is the language of the internet that every device understands.
Have you ever wondered how your phone or laptop interact with the internet or each other? How does data travel from one point to another? In today’s day and age, all the interactivity is done by using APIs. Application Programming Interface(API) provides all the communications that connect devices and services all across the internet. API provides a simpler way of interaction with other software.
Consider API as a messenger that takes requests from you, send it across the internet to notify a specific target server about the request you made. The server process the request and returns a response back to you. Take social media like Facebook for instance. When you click the ‘Like’ button on a video, your computer sends a message to Facebook. Facebook then updates its database with the like counts and sends you a list of related videos that you might be interested in.
Many companies also provide their own plugins for different purposes. A plugin is a software component that provides some additional functionality to your software. For example, many social media companies provide plugins for login, post, share content, etc. These plugins are linked with the company’s dedicated API connections(endpoints). Without this in place, companies would have to share codes with each other which would be tedious, difficult, and would create many privacy concerns.
A more technical example would be in gaming software like DirectX or OpenGL. These software provide an interface between your graphic card and games. This allows developers to create features for the games without worrying about different graphic cards used in the system since the API can talk to any mainstream graphics card.
APIs Usage
Access Data
- It allows multiple apps and services to work together.
- For example, instead of going to every airline website and searching for flights, we use a website that performs this task for us like ‘Kayak.com’ or ‘farecompare.com’. These websites use APIs provided by individual airlines to gather data and display it to us.
Hide Complexity
- APIs hide the complexity of the system so that developers can work on the main product rather than waste time on understanding complex underlying concepts.
- For example, Google maps use the device’s inbuilt GPS API and create their own features on top of it.
Extend Functionality
- Using APIs we can add more features to currently existing systems.
- For example, mobile widgets. We can add multiple widgets like weather or stock market on our phone screen which is an added functionality to the device.
Security/Privacy:
- APIs also act as gatekeepers for many services.
- For example, we can use social media accounts to login to third-party websites. It uses an authentication API to perform this action.
In a nutshell, learning what APIs are and how the internet works today is very important not only for the developers but to the general population itself. It gives us a better understanding of how internet work today. I will write a blog on how to get started with simple APIs and hit the code in the simplest way. Also, I will be covering many interesting internet technologies like how to reverse engineer websites, web cookies, and many more and explain them in the simplest way possible. Follow me to see them as soon as they are up.
Note: This is my first blog posted on Medium. I would appreciate if you can give me pointers on where I can grow. Feel free to point out any mistakes you have encountered.
I hope this article helped you understand APIs a little better.
Thank you for reading.
