API s for absolute beginners

Yeah, I think you know the meaning of the word APPLICATION PROGRAMMING INTERFACE. It is basically how different machines and software talk to each other to create ever more complex applications. It creates more complex software using these components because it contains a bunch of codes that can help to solve common problems in the real world.

Let’s take an example, think you have to make letters in uppercase in your code, you can use Toupper(),toUpperCase(),strtoupper(),.upper() based on your programming language.this is the simplest example of how API works.without that you can do it using low-level bit map methods. But your programming language helps to go out from that level and use simple API methods.

ok, now I think you have now roughly an idea about what is API looks like.then let’s move on to the

Why API build? and Why we use that?

Think you build a mobile application or web application then you’ll need a build a server to provide resources for that mobile app or web app. For that, you will have to build internal API s for your application And also you need to consume so many third party APIs to avoid rebuilding existing API s. Think if you want to add google maps locations or tracking for your application you didn’t want to write each line of code for the paint map on your application you just want to add google maps API for your application. it’s looking cool, isn’t it?

Now you can see there are two sides of API s. The first is the builder(API provider)and the second one is the consumer(developer).

However, you build an application that gains high popularity, other software developers or companies want to connect your API s for their purposes. Then you can turn your API s as an economy as a provider. Now you can understand the reason behind the scene. Why people make API s and use that. As an API provider you can turn it to the economy or as a developer you can reduce thousands of codes using API s.

How to be a good API

The API s should be,

• Easy to learn and understand
• Easy to use
• Less misuse
• Easy to extend
• Much powerful to satisfy requirements

Those are set of characteristics on how to make a good API.

Those are the basic concepts let’s continue the series in the next chapters.