Getting Started with RESTful APIs
An API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of subroutines and protocols that communicate between two components, if possible. To best comprehend the functionality of an API, let's take a look at the following case study.
Consider you have a functioning e-commerce website, and at a point in time you discover the need to track where your customers are actually located so that this data can be used for analytics and marketing purposes. So, you decide to integrate the Google Geolocation API on your e-commerce website instead of creating your own geolocation program from scratch, which would definitely cost you more in terms of both money and time.
Now, how does the Google Geolocation API work?
Whenever a customer visits your website after the Geolocation API is implemented on it, a request is fired to get the location of the GPS-enabled device that was used to access the website. Then, a response is fed back as a result. This response contains a location...