What is an Application Programming Interface (API)?
Web APIs are the means through which software can be distributed to people to make them capable of interfacing with web services developed by others.
Web APIs take different approaches and use different resources in different ways, but all of them operate on the concept of an API call, where a requestor makes a call to an API. These API calls return data to the requester and in an understandable, structured, and usable manner.
What Software uses APIs
Software applications create, consume and distribute services to other software. Services are comprised of functionality represented as one or more callable entities that are usually specified in a service specification or contract. These entities can be of the following types: commands, events, or data.
In the context of programming, an API is a specification for how applications interact with computer programs that are outside of the application itself. A service is an implementation of the API in some programming language.
We look at a few platforms that have link software to software like Zapier:
