CODEWITHSUNDEEP
apirest
Asaf
Asaf

Reputation: 2035

In what forms do APIs come in, and how to write them?

APIs are getting more and more popular and are used by developers to ease the process of developing applications to multiple platforms AND allow them to give other developers the ability to integrate their application's functionality into their own applications.

I've used APIs countless times before, but I'm now at the stage of developing my own applications. And as a developer who strives to create multi-platform applications - I need to use an API.

I'm going to use the RESTful approach as it's recommended the most.

After reading and looking for some background information, I came across: REST API Tutorial (which is really good site!), I learned that APIs basically receive HTTP requests, and return data in JSON/XML format.

However, there were 2 questions left unanswered to me:

  1. In what form do APIs come in? Are APIs actually files? a set of commands......?
  2. How do I actually write APIs? I'm talking about the server-side, data-handling code, and not the application/language-specific code (for sending out HTTP requests etc...)

It'd be great if someone could help me and answer the questions above as I have zero experience with APIs.

Any help is appreciated - much thanks!!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 333

Answers (2)

Kjartan
Kjartan

Reputation: 19151

Just a quick from-the-gut answer: They are whatever you want them to be!

Off the top of my head, I would define an API as requiring two main elements:

  1. Some documentation which makes it quite clear how to use the logic your systems prvides
  2. Some way to call those systems. That may be as simple as a web-site that accepts POST-messages, and checks them for certain variables and values in order to perform specific tasks.

In short, it should be entirely up to you. Just make sure you provide simple, clear and acurate documentation.

UPDATE, as an asnwer to the comment below:

That is how I interpret it, and it would seem that Wikipedia is more or less in agreement with me. PHP would be a perfect example: You could for instance create a PHP-file which processes a POST, and instead of outputting html, outputs XML with the resulting data needed. Then a third party app could POST to your PHP application, and receive and process the resulting XML.

Upvotes: 1

Paulo Henrique
Paulo Henrique

Reputation: 1025

Apis come as a response to a http request. It is a plain text response that u can use encoded via json or xml as you described.

There are a plenty of frameworks to help you develop and API.

In Ruby u can use grape or rais-api or even rails itself.

There is a lot more available, but this are the ones im most used to use.

Upvotes: 1

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