Today we are going to talk about the role of APIs in modern web development as web development advances have reached a certain stage where having better features simply means an edge over your competition.
This is a time when websites need to be connected with a lot of services and websites need to have more features to be able to fill the need of today’s market.
In a world like this APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) play an important role as an intermediary between your website and different services.
So, let us explore the role of APIs in web development as well as the kind of functionality they provide and their types as well as why they are so important in today’s modern web development.
Let us start with the important question what is API.
What are APIs? How Do They Work?
API, or Application Programming Interfaces are basically protocols and tools that act as a bridge between different software applications and websites in order for them to communicate better.
They are like intermediaries that follow standardised sets of requests and responses using defined data formats and protocols without sharing code.
This is a modern marvel of convenience although API as a term was coined way back in 1974 in the paper ‘The Relational and Network Approaches: Comparison of the Application Programming Interface.’
APIs were not really used between two different systems in the early stages of development as they were mostly used within system-level interactions. Back then it was difficult for different parts of a system to communicate with each other and APIs made it possible. We are talking about the time before the internet.
APIs now are mostly web-based.
APIs are just the bridge between a server and a database and your desktop or mobile which is ultimately accessed by you the user.
APIs are used by developers to get data from a web application. They are used in a scenario when systems need to connect to remote servers. You can think of this kind of utilisation for accessing weather data or other kinds of data.
When an API is used, a signal is usually sent to a specific URL as an endpoint and it is done with the purpose of retrieving data or submitting structure data.
After this is done, the API request is processed and a response is provided in formats of XML and JSON.
These Are the Commonly Used Types of API
Web API
This is one of the simplest introductions to web APIs. Web APIs are one of the most popular types of APIs and they are primarily designed for the uses of interaction with web-based services.
They allow websites to communicate with different services over the internet with the help of protocols like HTTP/HTTPS.
- Some common example types of Web APIs include RESTful (Representational State Transfer) API and these fulfil a lot of needs such as accessing databases (CRUD operations) as well as social media platforms and communicating with online resources.
- We also have SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) API and these are a little bit more complex as they are required for complex operations. They use XML for message format and these are mostly used when you need to uphold very strict protocols for banking and financial services.
- GraphQL APIs are excellent when it comes to requesting data and they can allow clients to ask for exactly what they need and this is a query language for APIs that makes it possible to prevent over-fetching or under-fetching of data. These are excellent for mobile applications as well as complex data queries and front-end development.
Third-Party API
As the name suggests, these are primarily used to communicate with third parties and are provided by third-party platforms. For example, if you want to integrate social media or maps into your website or services then you are going to need third-party APIs.
When it comes to third-party APIs, we can expect everything from payment gateway APIs in the form of PayPal and Square as well as Stripe APIs which are important to set up payment gateways.
We can also expect social media APIs in the form of Facebook and Twitter as well as LinkedIn APIs that allow web developers to integrate social media features.
Another very popular form of third-party API is Google Maps API if you need location services for your application.
Internal or Private API
If you need different systems and services of your organisation to be interconnected with each other and not be accessible publicly and only restricted to internal developers, you use internal APIs.
When it comes to internal APIs, we are looking at internal APIs for microservices architecture that allows you to connect microservices within your organisation.
We also have back-end systems API that forms a bridge between different backend systems like internal tools, authentication services and even databases.
We also have security as well as control APIs that are exactly what they sound like, used for security and compliance.
Find Out the Importance of APIs
Functionality
One of the most important reasons why web developers utilise APIs is simply because of functionality. APIs help developers extend the functionality of their applications and websites to external services and features.
This means if you want to start a food delivery business and you need to integrate maps with your services, you can simply use Google Maps API for it and you do not need to set up your own map service.
When you are trying to share something on social media or to other social media platforms from one platform, you do not need to have code sharing with them because you can just have APIs and they will do the job of enabling information exchange.
This is the reason for the importance of APIs in web development and this is the reason why APIs are so popular is simply because of the role they fulfil in providing an extension to every kind of service in the world whether it is a payment gateway or whether it is a mapping service or whether it is social media.
This is the kind of standardization that APIs bring to the world of the internet and the modern landscape of web development as every service out there can integrate itself with another service and every user can utilise everything and never compromise on functionality.
Efficiency
The truth of the matter is that web developers can make anything possible and they can even do what APIs do when it comes to integrating third party services or fulfilling the functionalities that APIs generally fulfil.
That is not impossible, however, that is very time-consuming and it simply does not make sense to do something like that and create functionality from scratch.
APIs streamline the development process and reduce the development timeline of applications by enabling developers to add functionalities quite easily in a tried and tested method that is not going to fail.
Instead of developing their own solutions, APIs allow them to use pre-build functionalities and solutions that are already being used by everyone else in the industry.
Scalability
Scalability is all about utilising methods that can be expanded without overtly complicated systems and the facilitation of distributed processing across multiple systems.
That is exactly what APIs do. APIs are about offloading resource-intensive tasks to external servers and databases instead of running them on a system.
APIs enable systems with very little processing power to access systems and utilise functionalities that would have never been possible with simple processing and storage systems.
APIs prevent the overloading of systems and make sure usable performance is always maintained.
This is something very crucial for every kind of website, especially for business websites and e-commerce sites.
Having scalable systems where you can add or remove functionality is very important for e-commerce businesses because you might need a functionality today and you might not need that tomorrow.
Having extra functionality will only make your website slow down and the only way to add or remove functionality with ease is possible with APIs.
Integration
APIs are all about the facilitation of integration between web applications and external services. So, when we ask the question, what is API in web, they act just like a bridge or like a waiter bringing food to your table from the kitchen.
The reason why APIs are so important is simply because you can innovate them your own way and create your own APIs and you can then allow everyone access to those APIs to utilise the services you have to offer.
This improves opportunities for collaboration instantaneously and this means the entire community out there is going to benefit from APIs.
Apart from that, API’s capability of integration is overall excellent for the development of the entire web development industry simply because small players in the industry can now hope to incorporate payment gateways, SMS systems and social networks on their websites without having to go through complicated code.
This makes sure that whenever there is an opening for opportunity in this industry, it is a win for everyone.
When it comes to integration and APIs, this is something just limited to your imagination because it all depends on what kind of functionalities you need for your website and you will have that with APIs, no need for natively coding solutions only to remove them if you are not using them when you can have APIs.
Flexibility
With the help of APIs, you can do anything you want as a developer as you can create a system with as many APIs as you want and import as many capabilities into it as much as you like.
For example, you can simply create a website that showcases the social media feed of people who upload pictures of flowers. You do not have to do anything; all you need to do is to integrate Twitter’s API.
Similarly, you can utilise some of the best authentication systems in the world and you do not even have to create your own system of authentication because better ones already exist.
The aspect of flexibility is most apparent in the case of e-commerce and business applications because when it comes to a business website, you do not need every feature in the world.
You just need the features that will currently facilitate business.
Imagine having two identical systems with one of the systems completely coded by your developers with all its features and no API and another system with functionalities integrated with the help of APIs.
You might need these functionalities today if they are being used during a special business campaign. Imagine you do not need these functionalities tomorrow.
Now imagine having to work all that much to have those functionalities natively coded only to remove it? Now imagine doing it with APIs. Which one would be more logical? Obviously, APIs.
That is precisely the level of flexibility that comes with APIS.
Security
Your first area of concern regarding APIs might be about security but you do not need to worry because APIs are excellent when it comes to security.
So, why are APIs important? This is the perfect answer to that. APIs are well suited for security and in fact, they are so good that they are mostly used by business websites and e-commerce websites for authentication and encryption as well as the implementation of payment gateways.
APIs can be protected to shield sensitive data when it is transferred between two different systems. This means when you are sending or receiving information with the help of this bridge, you can be assured that no financial transactions or user data is being transferred without authentication.
APIs can be secured with different encryption protocols such as the TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol.
TLS is excellent and nearly watertight against data manipulation and is widely adopted by APIs.
We hope this blog has been helpful for you to understand the entire meaning of APIs and how important they can be when it comes to modern web development.
If you too want to integrate various useful APIs into your existing systems and reap the benefits in terms of functionality then you are in the right place.
We are Think To Share and we are renowned for our web development services which includes API integration and we assure you an unlimited selection of APIs and functionalities.
In addition to that, we are also API developers ourselves and we would love to help you with anything related to web development and API integration.
We welcome you to visit our website and check out everything with you.
