Quora ads pixel

Application Programming Interface (API)

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a set of programming code that enables data transmission between one software product and another. It also contains the terms of this data exchange.

APIs consist of two components:

  1. a technical specification that describes the data exchange options between solutions with the specification done in the form of a request for processing and data delivery protocols and
  2. software interface written to the specification that represents it.

APIs contain and are implemented by function calls – language statements that request software to perform particular actions and services (like retrieving specific data from the server).

Main API specifications or protocols are

  • Remote Procedure Call (RPC),
  • Service Object Access Protocol (SOAP),
  • Representational State Transfer (REST),
  • gRPC, and
  • GraphQL.