Tuesday, October 04, 2016

What is an API? by Fast Tech Skills

hi and welcome to api video in this video we're going to have a look at API
and what is it and why it's so important to today's web
so basically API stands for application programming interface and it allows you
to do something amazing
so before we start talking about what is API specifically let's go to an example
let's say that this is the facebooks infrastructure Facebook's database so
this cylinder here is the facebooks database with all the users information
and information that users post all the images everything that Facebook owns and
their data centers and their code
everything that defines facebook so if it was 10 years ago people would go to
Facebook's website and they could access Facebook's functionality to the
facebooks web application or maybe a true their app if it was still based on
that previous architecture but there is one huge problem with this or with the
twitters or Google is kind of approach towards the matter just by allowing the
users accessing their services through their own products
let's go through an example let's say that i'm going to build my own app I'm
going to call it my app and i'm going to give it some functionalities that
usually these like abs these days have let's say that i'm going to give it some
share functionality
maybe even the facebook login or Google login
whatever you think that is possible with at steves days
the big problem is that if i want to employ any of these big names features
into my own app or even if i want to connect my own apt to a server which we
are going to talk about in future videos
the problem is that i can really access these services by our their web app or
mobile app that's that's an issue if if there is no way for me to connect these
services directly and exchange information then basically I
would not be able to use their services and information in my own custom app so
basically that's what API allows us to do and the API opens an interface that i
can connect to buy a my app and I can use that particular company services in
my own app by just cutting those services and that API into my own app
and use their billion-dollar infrastructure and bring more services
to my users of course you can have your own API on your server as i mentioned
before if you're abused as a back-end server which provides the app with the
content and user management then you need to build an API for your own
back-end servers but basically if you want to access any service outside of
your own apps code then you need to use an API at the kind of a standard API to
use those services each of these services that you see these days they
have their own kind of API that you can use in your app and the good thing is
that it's crazy what you can use in your app basically for free
sometimes you need to pay some money to use these api's but majority of times
they are free and sometimes there are some limitations on the use of API so
you won't go and over use the API and over use this service but you get the
idea you would be able to kind of boost your apps functionality using these
billion-dollar services in your app just by adding couple of lines of code
so it's a great great way for today's web to kind of connect different
services with each other and bring more functionality to people
another example would be in the web kind of area
facebook comments that's basically kind of accessing the facebooks functionality
through an API so hope you get the idea it's a very simple and basic idea and a
very valuable way to increase your apps functionality whether we're talking
about a mobile app or a web app
or basically employing these services in your own applications and making a good
use out of them
sometimes you can combine these different services together and come up
with different new functionalities which is going to solve a new problem that's
actually a very good idea to build new apps on so I thanks for watching this
video and I'll see you in the next one
don't forget to subscribe to this channel and leave a comment if you want
thanks for watching humanity and I'll see you later

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