APIs 101: What Exactly is an API? Part 1

[Music] hi I'm David Berlin editor-in-chief with programmable web and I'm here today to bring you an 11 part video series on AP is 101 now API stands for application programming interfaces perhaps you've heard of them and this series is for those of you who want to learn more about AP is maybe you read about them in Fortune magazine or somewhere else on the net you want to get smart you want have a conversation we're going to deliver to you today a basic to intermediate understanding of AP is what they are why they're important and what sort of benefits you can get if you start putting them to use in your organization so stay tuned for this series because it's going to be great now broadly speaking we're cover in about six or seven topics the first one of these is what exactly is an API and how do they work next we're going to talk about why you should invest in an API program whether you're not you're a developer who's consuming api's and using them in your software or if you're an organization is thinking about providing api's so the developers can use them then we're going to talk about how to productize API so this is a very important issue because a lot of organizations don't treat their api's as products that's a mistake we're going to talk about why we're talk about how to treat them as products so you get the best possible results out of them now an application programming interface is the sort of thing that hackers really love they always look for programmatic interfaces to get there hacking is done so it's very important to secure them whether you're putting them on your corporate network or you're going to be putting them on the Internet in either case security is one of the first concerns you need to think about we'll talk about security then we're going to talk about something called API first design and why it's so very important because you want to build the best api's the ones that developers are going to love to use and that's what API first design is all about and finally we're gonna do some hands-on we're going to show you how to build an API and how to consume it so let's get started with this first part of our video series which is what exactly is an API well as it turns out api's are exactly like user interfaces and you are very familiar with your typical user interface that's on your smartphone this interface is designed for a human to use it's a user interface and end-user like a human well ap eyes are really the exact same thing as a user interface except it's for an entirely different user it's not for a human being it's for a machine it's for something like a software application running on a computer to be able to access the same information the same way you might access it on your smartphone only it's designed so the machine can do it instead so on this slide what we're showing is that the machine that's actually going through an API which may be on a network that's why we have clouds on the slide could be your smartphone accessing a server across the network could be a smartphone accessing salesforce.com or Google on the other hand it could be two servers talking to each other maybe you have something like s ap talking through the network to salesforce.com to exchange some information through these networkable ap is now an API is a contract that exists between the two ends of the transaction right and I want to get some terminology really clear here we talk about AP eyes in terms of consumers and providers if you're a developer building an application and you're going to use an API that's out on the internet and incorporate it into your application you are considered the consumer of the API the consuming developer you're the API consumer right but if you're the organization like Google who is putting an API onto the Internet so the developers can consume it for example the Google Maps API then you are the API provider very important terminology to understand because throughout this series of videos we'll be talking about both consumers baby eyes and providers of api's now why would anybody do this what's so cool about it well as it turns out if you're an application developer you can outsource certain requirements of your application to an API so going back to that example of using Google Maps instead of writing all the code you would need to paint a map in your application you can actually just outsource all of that with one line of code to the Google Maps API so it's a really good example of how you might outsource some sort of functionality in your application another example might be a patient record maybe on a mobile application you have a app that can access your own patient portal and you might want to look at the results of your last medical visit to the hospital or to your doctor's office so you can look at a patient record you can look at a location as a pin represented on a map very often you see that happening in some applications where they have the Google Maps functionality built right into them and a little pin shows up at the location that you're either standing at or that you're going to go to or you might want to execute a financial transaction through an API there are standard API s for things like PayPal or other websites that can take financial transactions now in order for this to happen there has to be a technical contract that exists between the two parties a very exacting understanding between the application that's consuming the API and the API provider this is imperative because of that understanding is not exact and is not followed to the T then the actual API transaction will breakdown it's kind of like a legal contract if you think about like a famous sports player who plays for some team a soccer team or a football team he or she has to sit down and sign a legal contract and then both parties are bound to certain performance by that contract the player must behave a certain way in the field must deliver certain performance on the field and the organization must pay the player a certain amount of money for that performance behavior these are very exacting terms and an API is no different there is a contract that exists between the consumer of the API and the provider of the API and the way that performance of both is required the contract usually represents some agreed-upon standards on exactly how the information or the functionality like drawing a map and putting a pin on it is going to be exchanged sometimes it involves standards no standards could be de jure standards like the ones that are set by the w3c or they could be de facto standards the ones that are set may be by a bunch of players in an industry now we're at the end of this first part of our video series in part 2 we're going to talk about some real-world analogies that will help you to better on understand just how it is that API is do what they do we use a plug in the wall we're going to use some Lego and we're going to use a cargo ship a cargo ship why would we use a cargo ship come to the second part of this video series and you'll see why thanks very much and we'll see you in the next part [Music]

Channel: ProgrammableWeb

Views: 363,144

Rating: 4.8773637 out of 5

Keywords: API, What is an API, APIs, coding, developers, Application development

Id: cpRcK4GS068

Length: 7min 4sec (424 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2017