Essays

Meet the Robowaiter APIs Serving Us Data

Everything you need to know about what API's are and how they work

Planted over 7 years ago Last tended about 7 years ago
Wtf is an API?
An API is an applicaiton programming interface – a system that allows one programme to chat to another
Just like humans interact with a programme through a user interface, a programme interface interacts with other programmes
APIs that connect two programmes across the internet are called web APIs. They're just like tiny robowaiters bringing you data from acorss the web
Each API waiter has a menu of options that tells you want kind of data you can order. You tell the waiter what data you want and they dash off to fetch it for you
If you want to add YouTube videos to your website, you'd need to read the YouTube API docs, then add a line of code to your website that nicely asked the YouTube waiter to deliver you the video data

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