Fundamentals of Web APIs
In today’s world, web APIs are the backbone of the web. Millions of people use web APIs every day to purchase commodities, book a flight, get weather information, and more. In this chapter, we will learn about the fundamentals of web APIs. You might be wondering why we will start with the fundamental concepts. The answer is simple – we need to understand the basic concepts of web APIs before we build one.
This chapter introduces a couple of different web API styles, such as a REST-based API, a remote procedure call (RPC)-based API, a GraphQL API, and a real-time API. We will also learn about how to design them. If you would like to start developing a web API, feel free to jump to the next chapter.
In this chapter, we’ll be covering the following topics:
- What is a web API?
- What is a REST API?
- Designing a REST-based API
- What are RPC and GraphQL APIs?
- What is a real-time API?
After reading this chapter...
