CODEWITHSUNDEEP
apibackend
Joe
Joe

Reputation: 3160

Can an API and regular backend exist at the same time?

I've been looking at backends and APIs for a while now. It seems that sometimes devs will build a regular backend (in say a language like PHP) that handles all the backend matters and sometimes devs will instead choose to build out their backend through an API and then use their own (and possibly other) sites to pull data from this API.

I was wondering this:

Say I want to build a regular backend using a server-scripting language like PHP, which I will use to not only render my main website, but will also allow me to do other server-side scripting etc. Then say I want to use this data from the current site and make it accessible to another site of mine through API calls. Will it be possible to build an API on top of a regular backend?

If the answer yes, how complex can it get to achieve something like this?

What tools or design strategies (if any) would you have or have used for achieving this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 163

Answers (1)

chipit24
chipit24

Reputation: 6987

This is an old question, but since I'm here, I may as well provide an answer for anyone wondering. Joe is asking about server-side web APIs versus regular server-side code.

Yes, you can have a "regular" backend and an API backend exist at the same time. If your backend is in PHP, you can refactor and extend your code to handle API requests.

Like Patrick Evans said, an API is the backend. If your backend PHP code communicates with a database to manipulate or retrieve data, then you can consider this an API transaction. Whenever your backend receives a request, evaluates/actions that request, and returns a response, it is essentially acting like an API.

Let's say you own example.com, with an index.php file in the root directory - so when a user requests example.com in their browser, this index.php file is processed and served to them. Now, you can set up this index.php file to handle both regular page requests (i.e. the php script returns an html template that is rendered by the browser) and API calls. This can be as complex or as simple as you want it to be.

The best way to handle this would be to assign different routes for rendering your main webpages and API calls. You can set up routes in the following way...

example.com/index.php?route=api&data=users can be handled by your 'API code' in index.php to return a JSON response containing a list of all the users in your database, while example.com/index.php?route=home will just return your website's home page.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions