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What is an API?

 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 :)

 


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