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The Backbone of Modern Digital Interactions
In today’s interconnected digital world, enterprises increasingly rely on APIs to interact with customers and partners. API or Application Programming Interfaces plays a pivotal role in facilitating communication and data exchange between different software systems and services.
Lets break into simpler terms:
Application – Any software that has specific functionality or purpose.
Interface – Refers to contract or protocol between two applications, using requests and responses.
An APIs can be used to collect data from different trusted sources and analyze data in a way more accurately and effectively.
An API is the most powerful and versatile means to connect diverse and disparate software applications. APIs allow developers to add features and functionality to software by utilizing rich array of other developer’s API s.
These APIs are all not equal, Developers can work with different types of API types, protocols and architectures that suits unique needs of different applications and businesses.
Four Types of Web API’s
Public APIs : These are also called as open APIs or external APIs. An application programming interface made publicly available to software developers or businesses. These open APIs are published openly on internet and shared freely. Allowing owner of network accessible service to give universal access to consumers.
Some of the most popular public APIs are Facebook API, Twitter API, Open weather MAP API, Spotify API, NEWS API. These are cost effective, Increased functionality, Access to valuable data and insights.
Partner APIs: These API are exposed to or by the strategic business partners. They are not publicly available. They need specific entitlement. They have incorporated with stronger authentication, authorization and security mechanisms.
Best Partner API example is the Amazon API.
Internal APIs : These are programmatic interface for sharing information between teams inside the company. Sometime referred as private or enterprise APIs. They are often used to share sensitive resources within an organization’s IT infrastructure.
Composite APIs : They combine two or more APIs to craft a sequence of related or interdependent operations. Composite APIs can be beneficial to address complex related API and sometimes improve speed and performance over individual APIs.
Three type of API protocols or architectures
There are three categories of API protocols which exchange commands and data, with rules, structures and constraints that govern an API operations. SOAP, RPC, REST
SOAP : Simple Object Access Protocol is a standard protocol from Microsoft. It is a message specification for exchanging information between systems and applications. SOAP API is developed in more structured and formalized way. It is broadly used to create web APIs , usually with XML.
RPC : Remote Procedural Call protocol is a simple means to send multiple parameters and receive results. RPC APIs invoke executable actions or processes. RPC can employ two different languages XML, JSON , for coding these are dubbed to JSON-RPC and XML-RPC .
REST : The Representational State Transfer architecture is perhaps the most popular approach to build APIs. REST relies on client and server approach that separates front and back ends of API and provides flexibility in development and implementation. These are also called as RESTful or REST based APIs , which can communicate directly or operate through API gateways and load balancers. It has resource oriented features and also has freedom from format restrictions.
Now Lets get into APIs testing through Postman tool
Postman is an API platform for building, developing and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration and can create better APIs faster.
How does API work?
Web API are the type of APIs that delivers client requests and responses via JSON /XML.
Each request and response cycle is an API call. A request typically consists of a server end point URL and request method through HTTP – Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.
If the request method indicates desired API action , the HTTP response contains a status code 200 Ok header. The response body varies depends upon request and it could be server resource that client needs to access or application with specific messages .
To interact with APIs we have various HTTP methods in postman, each HTTP method serves a specific purpose in API communication. They have various scopes , benefits and intended audience, which make each of them uniquely suited for different purposes.
To begin working with Postman , Swagger URL or Open API specification (OAS) URL is provided by the organization or developer who has implemented the API. It serves as machine readable representation of endpoints, parameters, requests, response schemas and authentication requirements.
Official API Contract Documentation this involves all the information needed to explore including credentials for authorization and interact with API specifications programmatically.
Then you can enable variables where you can store and reuse values or URL in postman. By storing it, can be used as reference through out working collections and environments.
Process to set up a new variable. Variables also help to collaborate with teammates and setup dynamic workflows .
With the few examples., I would like to explain some of the HTTP methods where we can interact with APIs by fetching Users profiles .
1. POST : This method is used to submit data to the server to create a new resource. By sending a POST request body containing the data a new resource will be created.
2 . GET Method:
GET Method or operation used To retrieve all users using and got the positive type scenario with HTTP status code of 200 Ok Success message.
3 . PUT : This method is used to Update existing user profile on the server. By sending PUT request end point along with request body containing the updated data can achieve this scenario.
With the endpoint of updateuser/{userid} can able to update the required user information.
4 . DELETE: This method is used to delete the existing resource from the server. With the endpoint of deleteuser/{userid} can be done successfully.
HTTP status codes are standard responses provided by web servers to indicate outcomes of client requests. These codes are categorized in different levels.
1xx Informational
2xx Success
3xx Redirection
4xx Client error
5xx Server error
Understanding these status codes for diagnosing and troubleshooting issues with web servers and APIs is crucial .
By mastering these above concepts, a data analyst can leverage the full potential of APIs to build robust and efficient data integration and analysis systems , ultimately driving to better business insights and outcomes .
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