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<title>Application Programming Interfaces - Full Stack Python</title>
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<h1>Application Programming Interfaces</h1>
<p>Application programming interfaces (APIs) provide machine-readable
data transfer and signaling between applications.</p>
<h2>Why are APIs important?</h2>
<p>HTML, CSS and JavaScript create human-readable webpages. However, those
webpages are not easily consumable by other machines.</p>
<p>Numerous scraping programs and libraries exist to rip data out of HTML but
it's simpler to consume data through APIs. For example, if you want the
content of a news article it's easier to get the content through an API than
to scrap the text out of the HTML.</p>
<h2>Key API concepts</h2>
<p>There are several key concepts that get thrown around in the APIs world. It's
best to understand these ideas first before diving into the API literature.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Representation State Transfer (REST)</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Webhooks</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and Extensible Markup Language (XML)</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Endpoints</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h2>Webhooks</h2>
<p>A webhook is a user-defined HTTP callback to a URL that executes when a
system condition is met. The call alerts the second system via a POST or GET
request and often passes data as well.</p>
<p>Webhooks are important because they enable two-way communication initiation
for APIs. Webhook flexibility comes in from their definition by the API user
instead of the API itself.</p>
<p>For example, in the <a href="https://www.twilio.com/api">Twilio API</a> when a text
message is sent to a Twilio phone number Twilio sends an HTTP POST request
webhook to the URL specified by the user. The URL is defined in a text box
on the number's page on Twilio as shown below.</p>
<p><img src="theme/img/twilio-webhook-definition.jpg" width="100%" alt="Webhook definition in the Twilio API." class="technical-diagram" /></p>
<h2>API open source projects</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/wordnik/swagger-core">Swagger</a> is an open source project
written in Scala that defines a standard interface for RESTful APIs.</li>
</ul>
<h2>API resources</h2>
<ul>
<li>
<p><a href="https://zapier.com/">Zapier</a> has an
<a href="https://zapier.com/blog/apis-101/">APIs 101</a> free guide for what APIs
are, why they are valuable and how to use them properly. </p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://sendgrid.com/blog/whats-webhook/">What is a webhook?</a> by
<a href="https://twitter.com/YayNickQ">Nick Quinlan</a> is a plain English explanation
for what webhooks are and why they are necessary in the API world.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://keithba.net/simplicity-and-utility-or-why-soap-lost">Simplicity and Utility, or, Why SOAP Lost</a>
provides context for why JSON-based web services are more common today than
SOAP which was popular in the early 2000s.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h2>APIs learning checklist</h2>
<ol>
<li>
<p>Learn the API concepts of machine-to-machine communication with JSON and
XML, endpoints and webhooks.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Integrate an API such as Twilio or Stripe into your web application.
Read the <a href="/api-integration.html">API integration</a> section for more
information.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Use a framework to create an API for your own application. Learn about
web API frameworks on the <a href="/api-creation.html">API creation</a> page.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Expose your web application's API so other applications can consume data
you want to share.</p>
</li>
</ol>
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