A brief overview of the SharePoint APIs
While learning SharePoint, you may find alternative solutions using different APIs. Although most will be conceptually useful, some may not be applicable to SharePoint Online. In this section, we will quickly recap what is available and how to leverage it.
The SharePoint web services API
Available since version 1, the SharePoint web services are implemented using SOAP. This protocol is intended for machine-to-machine communication and requires tedious XML message crafting. You can easily identify a web service example as it is hosted under the path /_vti_bin
and uses the extension .asmx
.
The SPServices project offers a JavaScript API that simplifies the use of SharePoint web services. It has many examples and a large community (http://sympmarc.github.io/SPServices/).
Even though web services can used in SharePoint Online, newer APIs are usually easier to use from PowerShell.
The SharePoint server-side API and PowerShell API
The server-side API was the method...