Chapter 5. Exploring Application Programming Interface

Application Programming Interface (API) is a set of protocols, routines, and tools used to build software applications. The main purpose of API is data exchange and integration, whereas Software Development Kit (SDK) is customization. The type of API varies based on the data exchange and transport mechanism. The transport mechanism may be web-based, source code, or binary function.

Following are the most common types of API:

• Web Services API
  • This is an API that is highly useful in up and coming technologies. It is hypertext-based and the standards used are REST, SOAP, XML-RPC, and JSON-RPC.
  • It is commonly used in web applications and service-oriented architecture (SOA).
• Source code API
  • This offers libraries of objects, classes, and so on
  • It is commonly used in development projects
  • The standards used vary based on the platform, such as .NET or J2EE

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Exploring API using PowerShell
• The...