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...