What is a web API?
API stands for application programming interface. A web API, as the name suggests, is a set of programming interfaces for the web. For example, when you book a flight on a website, the browser makes a request to the airline’s server through a web API to access the airline’s database. The airline’s server then returns the information about the flight to the browser, allowing you to book your flight in it.
APIs have been delivered by organizations for decades. With the appearance of the World Wide Web, people needed a way to communicate between the server and the client.
We can build web APIs using different technologies, such as Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, .NET, and so on. Also, they have various styles. You might have heard of terms such as SOAP, Web Service, and REST. They are all based on the HTTP protocol but communicate in different ways.
In this book, we consider web APIs as a wider concept than REST. In the digital world, the way...
