With preeminent features, Web API is increasingly widely applied in website construction. What is Web API? How does Web API work? Discover these interesting information in the article below!
What is Web API?
The full name of the API is Application Programming Interface (roughly translated: Application programming interface). To put it simply, an API is a method of connecting libraries or applications together.
With APIs, developers can access commonly used functions and exchange data between applications. From here, we can understand Web API is a programming interface on a website platform, allowing applications to connect and exchange data with each other.
Basically, Web API is a framework used to build web services with HTTP protocol. In other words, Web API is an application programming interface for a web server (web server) and web browser.
How does Web API work?
Web API works according to the model of interaction between systems (System – System interaction). In particular, data or information from one system may be processed by another. The resulting data will then be displayed to the viewer.
In principle, Web API receives requests from different types of client devices such as phones, laptops, etc. These requests will be sent to the web server to process and return the desired data to the client.
Typically, a Web API will work according to the following basic process:
Create an API URL so that 3rd parties can send requests to the server by providing content via HTTP/HTTPS protocol.
At the server, the source applications perform validation checks and return the appropriate content.
The server returns data in XML or JSON format over HTTP/HTTPS protocol.
The returned data will be analyzed to build a database at the place of the original request (web application, mobile application).
Hopefully this article can help you better understand what Web API is, how it works and its application in web design!