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API is the acronym for Application Programming Interface. If you search for ‘What is API’ on a search engine, you will get a lot of incomprehensible and dry definitions. But without this technology there would be no modern IT product. In Filio Force it company blog we will explain what API is.
API is a type of interface. The name itself tells us that: interface literally means ‘to touch’. Every day you interact with different interfaces without even thinking about it.
The experts at Filio Force Inc give the following example. To heat food in the microwave, you press familiar buttons, or to get to the right floor in the lift, you press a specific button. These controls are the user interface of the microwave and the lift. In other words, it is the way a person interacts with these devices. In order to use various appliances and devices, you don’t necessarily need to understand how they work or what happens inside them when you touch them. We just know that if we press a certain button we will get the result we want.
To use a television, for example, you need a remote control. If you press the volume up button, the volume goes up. At this point, are you interested in what is happening inside the remote control or the TV? You just want the volume to go up. In the digital world, you’re using essentially the same controls, but they’ve migrated to the screen of the device. They’re called GUIs – Graphical User Interfaces. But a person still interacts with it through a regular user interface, such as a mouse with a keyboard or a touch screen.
So far we have talked about interface in terms of user interaction with a device or a program. But what if a programme needs to interact with another programme? Let’s say you’re writing software for an intelligent alarm clock, and you want it to give you information about the weather when you wake up. Programs with this functionality already exist, and you just want to get this information from them. This is where the API – Application Programming Interface – comes in. In other words, the main program of the alarm clock should use the API of the weather service to get the necessary data. In this case, neither we nor our programme have any idea how the data is calculated and prepared: the alarm clock has simply asked and received an answer from the service.
The user does not see the communication between applications. You have no idea how many times a day when you use your favourite service, you are actually using a dozen different services at the same time. The API allows programmers to create chains of programmes, put them together like a jigsaw puzzle and make them work as a whole, say Filio Force managers.
In short, an API is simply a kind of interface designed for interaction between programs. Thanks to API technology, programmers all over the world can use each other’s work and make our world a little better every day.