The abbreviation of an API is "Application Programming Interface". Many developers use APIs in their applications to enhance the working of their applications because without writing any complex codes they can use that various kinds of services through APIs.
We don't know how it is made
but we can use all its features(the final product) a simple example we can
consider is any food item we don't know how it is made but we enjoy the final
product.
Let's take a small example, you
often visit so many websites and you can see there will be a 'sign up' option
when you click it you may able to see some options like 'sign in with google'
or 'sign in with Twitter' or 'sign in with Facebook' , etc, so what happens
back there when you click that, does the application directly interacts with
google or any company servers?
No absolutely not this is where
the APIs come into the picture, API's will act like a mediator between the
servers and your application.
Let's assume you clicked on
sign in with google then what happens is (you can refer to the below picture)
By referring to the above picture
we can see the working flow of an API
1. We click on the sign
up with google button in that application
2. Then for sign up an
API will be there which is released by google
3. So this API takes that
request and tries to access the data from the google servers and verify us
with that data
4. Then that verification
sends back to the API
5. That API will deliver
us the success message
Companies cant give
direct access to their servers, right?
So these APIs will help us
communicate with company servers and use their functionalities and services.
Many companies release their
APIs some of them are free and some of them are paid.
If we take Google as an example
their most popular API is Google maps, many food delivery applications use this
API in their application, so here no application is directly accessing google
maps instead it will ask the API first and then the API sends the request to
google maps.
There are many more APIs like
weather API, text-to-speech API, speech-to-text API, etc.
Finally, I would conclude that
by using APIs it makes your job easier and you can use various features without
coding them.
Feel free to comment and Thank
you for reading my blog :)
Comments
Post a Comment