Assuming that you’ve heard the word ‘API’ for like a zillion times while communicating with mobile app developers, today I’m going to cover everything about APIs in this article which includes what is API, API development, how to use API, how does API work and so on. So, put on your seat belts and get ready to get into the world of APIs – the superheroes behind the functioning of the mobile apps.
Let’s begin with what are APIs?
What is API and Why Is It Important?
API (Application Programming Interface software) is a set of instructions, standards or requirements that enables a software or app to employ features/services of another app, platform or device for better services. In short, it’s something that lets apps communicate with each other.
For example, when we hit the ‘Connect Facebook’ button on Candy Crush, it does not ask us to enter our Facebook account details. Rather, it accesses the data from the Facebook server and lets us enjoy playing – all thanks to API.
An API is the base of all the apps that deal with data or enable communication between two products or services. It empowers a mobile application or platform to share its data with other apps/platforms and ease the user experience without involving the developers. On the top of it, APIs eliminate the need to build a similar program or platform from scratch; you can use the existing one or some other app/platform. Because of these factors, both app developers and business leaders focus on the API development process.
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Terminologies of API development
- a) API Key: When an API request through a header or parameter to recognize the requester, the authorized code passed into the request is said to be an API Key.
- b) Endpoint: When an API interacts with another system, one end of the communication channel is termed as Endpoint.
- c) JSON: JavaScript Object Notion or JSON is said to be a data format used for APIs request parameters and response body.
- d) GET: The RESTful application program interface’s HTTP method of obtaining resources is called GET.
- e) POST: It is the RESTful API’s HTTP method for building resources.
- f) OAuth: It is basically an Open standard authorization framework that renders access from the user’s side without directly sharing the credentials.
- g) REST: REST (Representational State Transfer) is a kind of programming architectural implementation meant to enhance the efficiency of communication between the two devices/systems. It is light-weighted and based on the idea of making a particular data available only when requested by sharing references to the data instead of the entire copy of the data itself. The systems enforced on this architecture are said to be ‘RESTful’ systems, and the most overwhelming example of RESTful systems is the World Wide Web.
- h) SOAP: SOAP or Simple Object Access Protocol is a messaging protocol for sharing structured information in the execution of web services in computer networks. It works with XML information set and application layer protocols (like HTTP and SMTP) for message format and message negotiation & transmission, respectively.
- i) Latency: Latency is defined as the total time taken by API interface in the process from the request to the response.
- j) Rate-Limiting: The term API Rate-limiting refers to the process of defining the rate at which an end user can access the APIs. In other words, it means restricting the number of requests a user can hit to an API per time.
- k) API Throttling: The process of regulating the usage of APIs by users during a particular time period is called Throttling. This can be used for API limiting. For example, you set the limit of 1000 API requests per day. When the user hit the 1001 request, the server will send 429 messages as HTTP status to the end user along with the message, “Too many Requests”.
Working of API
Suppose you opened some XYZ app/website to book a flight. You filled the form – you entered the departure and return date, city, flight, and other relevant details – and submitted. Within a fraction of seconds, a list of flights appears on the screen along with the price, timings, seat availability, and other details. How does this actually happen?
To provide such stringent data, the platform sent a request to the airline’s website to access their database and get relevant data via API interface. The website responded with the data which API Integration delivered to the platform and the platform displayed it on the screen.
Here, the flight booking app/platform and airline’s website act as endpoints while API as the intermediate streamlining the data sharing process. When talking about communicating the endpoints, the API works in two ways, namely: REST and SOAP (see definition above).
Though both the methods bring effective results, a mobile app development company prefer REST over SOAP since SOAP APIs are heavy and platform-dependent.
To understand the API lifecycle and know how does API work in detail, contact our experts today!
Now coming to the main part – How to develop an API? What API development tools and technologies to choose? What practices to adopt for effective API development?
Tools for API Development (like a PRO..)
While there are a plethora of API design tools and technologies equipped into the process of creating an API, the popular API development technologies and tools for developing APIs for developers are:
- a) Apigee: It is a Google’s API management provider that assists the developers and entrepreneurs to triumph at digital transformation by re-establishing towards an API Integration approach.
- b) APIMatic and API Transformer: These are other popular tools for API development. They offer sophisticated automatic generation tools to build top-quality SDKs and code snippets from API specific formats and transform them into other specification formations, such as RAML, API Blueprint, etc.
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