Introduction

Basic introduction to Apis and their usage

Introduction to Web APIs

A web API is short for Application Programming Interface and is the channel you communicate with a software system. In many ways it is the portal into an organisations for you to communicate. This allows you to cooperate with the organisations software platform and consume the services the organisation provides.

Technologies to use for communication

An API can use any language or protocol for communication, most common for open and public APIs these days is through human readable text structured as JSON documents.

There are many technologies to chose from when communication with an API. For exampl making your own client in for example .Net or JavaScript or using a tool like Postman or SoapUI.

Authorization

To read and write data from a public api its common to need some kind of autrorization. This allows the API to control who has access to data and who is inserting data, to protect sensitive data and facilitate functionality related to an external organisation or person. In addition it can better allow for control of how much usage is permitted.