Introducing APIs
Most communication over the web is done using http protocol, which specifies a set of request/response protocols for exchanging data between a client and a server. The client, which is often a web browser, submits a request for data from the server, and the server sends a response. Typically, the response is an HTML web page. The response, however, can also be data in some text format.
The most popular types of requests are get requests and post requests. In this chapter, I will just cover get requests, which will be used to retrieve data from the API. A get request is a request that asks for data from the server.
An API specifies a URL and a set of variables that can be used to retrieve data using http requests. The following is the URL where the Seeclickfix API is located: https://Seeclickfix.com/api/v2.
When you go to the Seeclickfix API URL in a web browser, or to any website for that matter, the web browser submits a get request to the URL. If the get request is successful...
