Web APIs for new developers

Dear new developer,

Chances are high that you’ll be working with other code as a developer.

I remember when I was first starting out and saw the acronym API everywhere. I had no idea what it stood for. In case you are in the same boat, it means Appliciation Programming Interface. What that means is it is a defined way for your code to call into another piece of code.

One of the most common ways to do so in an interconnected time is via a web API. A web API (as I define it) provides significant functionality for your application, across the internet, over HTTP. You may or may not control the API, and you may or may not use an SDK to access the API. (There are, of course, many other ways to integrate other functionality into your application, depending on what you’re doing.)

This article does a good job of discussing some of what you should be aware of when you are accessing web APIs. In particular:

First, a clarification: the term API is used to refer to lots of different things, and its emphasis has shifted a great deal over the years. If you’ve learned anything about Object Oriented development, you may be familiar with APIs as code components that have well-defined interfaces, allowing “customer” code to access the features and functionalities within a system. These APIs usually involve objects and methods / functions. This is not the type of API we’re going to talk about in this article. 😅

In this article, we’re dealing with the kind of API you use to manage access to data and services over the web. If you’ve come across the terms HTTP API or REST API, that’s what we’re talking about. With this type of API, client apps make requests to endpoints to carry out operations on data. An example would be a database for a shop that has a web app and a mobile app – with an API managing access to the data from both apps.

The article goes on to discuss different concerns you should have as a developer interacting with web APIs.

The power of web APIs is that you can gain access to a quite complicated system via a simple API call. Examples of this include:

• Looking up stores or restaurants that are close to you (Google Maps)
• Making a charge against a credit card (Stripe)
• Sending a text message (Twilio)

These all used to be tremendously complicated tasks, sometimes taking weeks to months to set up. Now you can access them and put together an application that does all three in hours. We stand on the shoulders of giants, indeed.

You don’t just benefit from the API integration one time. The API provider has an incentive (especially you are paying them in data or money) to improve their service. And often you can get the benefits of that improvement without lifting a finger.

If you have a large task that you want to do as part of an application, it’s worth googling around a bit to see if someone has already encapsulated it in an API.

Sincerely,

Dan