Understanding the developer landscape

Building applications requires understanding the developer landscape. The developer landscape is everything that is available to build our solutions. There are APIs and SDKs available to access and manage Azure Digital Twins instances. But what is the difference between an API and an SDK? Let's start explaining each of them.

API stands for Application Programming Interface. As the name suggests, it's an interface. An interface allows software to interact with other software even if they use a different type of language and/or definition. The interface is an intermediate between the software and uses a uniform and consistent language. There are different forms of APIs. An example that we will discuss later in this chapter is the REST API.

SDK stands for Software Development Kit. As the name indicates, it is a kit. A kit indicates a set of tools to make our lives easier. Tools contain software libraries, documentation, code samples...