APIs Explained in 5 minutes short article
If you work in Tech or in an adjacent attack, you’ve probably heard the abbreviation API being thrown around, so let’s talk about apis. Any software that has a specific function or purpose interface is just that, any software that has a contract or a protocol that dictates how two applications talk is just that, any software that has a purpose interface is just that. Let’s say you have a non-technical analogy and you want to communicate with each other. The customer service person puts you on hold if it’s possible to do that at the last minute, but it takes a minute. It was up to you to figure out how many people had made reservations, because there was no customer service person. It’s a lot of unnecessary work to figure out whether you can add three more people to your reservation or not, because it’s a more people to your reservation that’s a lot of unnecessary work. In this analogy, the restaurant is an application that provides a specific service, and in this analogy, the private data about who’s eating there that night and who’s eating there that night and who works there is also an application that provides a specific service. The restaurant’s API is the interface through which you can communicate with the restaurant and make requests, and the customer service rep from the restaurant is the group of friends. For a more technical example, think about Apple’s weather app, do we think that Apple decided
To set up weather monitoring stations? There are already services out there that collect global weather data meticulously collect global weather data services like weather.com so if services like weather.com creates an API we could see that happening. The example of web apis is the type of apis that is used in the weather app. The server endpoint URL and request method are usually used through a hypertext transfer protocol and the request method is used to indicate the desired action. It could be the server resource a client needs to access, or it could be the application specific message a client needs to access. To get more in depth about apis and the various different types that exist, I encourage you to check out the article linked in the description below.