An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more
computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software
interface, offering a service to other pieces of
software. A document or standard that describes how to build or use such a connection or interface is called an ''API specification''. A computer system that meets this standard is said to ''implement'' or ''expose'' an API. The term API may refer either to the specification or to the implementation.
In contrast to a
user interface, which connects a computer to a person, an application programming interface connects computers or pieces of software to each other. It is not intended to be used directly by a person (the
end user
In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use a product. The end user stands in contrast to users who support or maintain the product, such as sysops, system administrat ...
) other than a
computer programmer
A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software.
A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...
who is incorporating it into the software. An API is often made up of different parts which act as tools or services that are available to the programmer. A program or a programmer that uses one of these parts is said to ''call'' that portion of the API. The calls that make up the API are also known as
subroutine
In computer programming, a function or subroutine is a sequence of program instructions that performs a specific task, packaged as a unit. This unit can then be used in programs wherever that particular task should be performed.
Functions may ...
s, methods, requests, or
endpoints. An API specification ''defines'' these calls, meaning that it explains how to use or implement them.
One purpose of APIs is to
hide the internal details of how a system works, exposing only those parts a programmer will find useful and keeping them consistent even if the internal details later change. An API may be custom-built for a particular pair of systems, or it may be a shared standard allowing
interoperability among many systems.
The term API is often used to refer to
web APIs,
which allow communication between computers that are joined by the
internet. There are also APIs for
programming languages,
software libraries, computer
operating systems, and
computer hardware
Computer hardware includes the physical parts of a computer, such as the computer case, case, central processing unit (CPU), Random-access memory, random access memory (RAM), Computer monitor, monitor, Computer mouse, mouse, Computer keyboard, ...
. APIs originated in the 1940s, though the term did not emerge until the 1960s and 1970s. Recent developments in APIs have led to the rise in popularity of
microservices, which are loosely coupled services accessed through public APIs.
Purpose
In building applications, an API simplifies programming by
abstracting
An abstract is a brief summary of a research article, thesis, review, conference proceeding, or any in-depth analysis of a particular subject and is often used to help the reader quickly ascertain the paper's purpose. When used, an abstract always ...
the underlying implementation and only exposing objects or actions the developer needs. While a graphical interface for an
email client might provide a user with a button that performs all the steps for fetching and highlighting new emails, an API for file
input/output might give the developer a
function that copies a file from one location to another without requiring that the developer understand the
file system
In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one larg ...
operations occurring behind the scenes.
History of the term
The term ''API'' initially described an interface only for end-user-facing programs, known as
application programs. This origin is still reflected in the name "application programming interface." Today, the term is broader, including also
utility software and even
hardware interfaces.
1940s and 1950s
The idea of the API is much older than the term itself. British computer scientists
Maurice Wilkes
Sir Maurice Vincent Wilkes (26 June 1913 – 29 November 2010) was a British computer scientist who designed and helped build the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), one of the earliest stored program computers, and who inv ...
and
David Wheeler worked on a modular
software library in the 1940s for
EDSAC
The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) was an early British computer. Inspired by John von Neumann's seminal ''First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC'', the machine was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the Universi ...
, an early computer. The
subroutine
In computer programming, a function or subroutine is a sequence of program instructions that performs a specific task, packaged as a unit. This unit can then be used in programs wherever that particular task should be performed.
Functions may ...
s in this library were stored on
punched paper tape organized in a
filing cabinet. This cabinet also contained what Wilkes and Wheeler called a "library catalog" of notes about each subroutine and how to incorporate it into a program. Today, such a catalog would be called an API (or an API specification or API documentation) because it instructs a programmer on how to use (or "call") each subroutine that the programmer needs.
Wilkes and Wheeler's 1951 book ''
The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer'' contains the first published API specification.
Joshua Bloch considers that Wilkes and Wheeler "latently invented" the API because it is more of a concept that is discovered than invented.
1960s and 1970s
The term "application program interface" (without an ''-ing'' suffix) is first recorded in a paper called ''Data structures and techniques for remote
computer graphics'' presented at an
AFIPS conference in 1968.
The authors of this paper use the term to describe the interaction of an application—a graphics program in this case—with the rest of the computer system. A consistent application interface (consisting of
Fortran subroutine calls) was intended to free the programmer from dealing with idiosyncrasies of the graphics display device, and to provide
hardware independence if the computer or the display were replaced.
The term was introduced to the field of
databases by
C. J. Date
Chris Date (born 1941) is an independent author, lecturer, researcher, and consultant, specializing in relational database theory.
Biography
Chris Date attended High Wycombe Royal Grammar School (U.K.) from 1951 to 1958 and received his BA i ...
in a 1974 paper called ''The
Relational and
Network Approaches: Comparison of the Application Programming Interface''. An API became a part of the
ANSI/SPARC framework for
database management system
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases span ...
s. This framework treated the application programming interface separately from other interfaces, such as the query interface. Database professionals in the 1970s observed these different interfaces could be combined; a sufficiently rich application interface could support the other interfaces as well.
This observation led to APIs that supported all types of programming, not just application programming.
1990s
By 1990, the API was defined simply as "a set of services available to a programmer for performing certain tasks" by technologist
Carl Malamud.
The idea of the API was expanded again with the dawn of
remote procedure calls
In distributed computing, a remote procedure call (RPC) is when a computer program causes a procedure (subroutine) to execute in a different address space (commonly on another computer on a shared network), which is coded as if it were a normal (lo ...
and
web APIs. As
computer networks became common in the 1970s and 1980s, programmers wanted to call libraries located not only on their local computers but on computers located elsewhere. These remote procedure calls were well supported by the
Java language in particular. In the 1990s, with the spread of the
internet, standards like
CORBA,
COM
Com or COM may refer to:
Computing
* COM (hardware interface), a serial port interface on IBM PC-compatible computers
* COM file, or .com file, short for "command", a file extension for an executable file in MS-DOS
* .com, an Internet top-level d ...
, and
DCOM competed to become the most common way to expose API services.
2000s
Roy Fielding's dissertation ''Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures'' at
UC Irvine in 2000 outlined
Representational state transfer (REST) and described the idea of a "network-based Application Programming Interface" that Fielding contrasted with traditional "library-based" APIs.
XML and
JSON
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other ser ...
web APIs saw widespread commercial adoption beginning in 2000 and continuing as of 2022. The web API is now the most common meaning of the term API.
The
Semantic Web proposed by
Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profess ...
in 2001 included "semantic APIs" that recasts the API as an
open, distributed data interface rather than a software behavior interface.
Proprietary interfaces and agents became more widespread than open ones, but the idea of the API as a data interface took hold. Because web APIs are widely used to exchange data of all kinds online, API has become a broad term describing much of the communication on the internet.
When used in this way, the term API has overlap in meaning with the term
communication protocol.
Usage
Libraries and frameworks
The interface to a
software library is one type of API. The API describes and prescribes the "expected behavior" (a specification) while the library is an "actual implementation" of this set of rules.
A single API can have multiple implementations (or none, being abstract) in the form of different libraries that share the same programming interface.
The separation of the API from its implementation can allow programs written in one language to use a library written in another. For example, because
Scala and
Java compile to compatible
bytecode
Bytecode (also called portable code or p-code) is a form of instruction set designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter. Unlike human-readable source code, bytecodes are compact numeric codes, constants, and references (norma ...
, Scala developers can take advantage of any Java API.
API use can vary depending on the type of programming language involved.
An API for a
procedural language such as
Lua
Lua or LUA may refer to:
Science and technology
* Lua (programming language)
* Latvia University of Agriculture
* Last universal ancestor, in evolution
Ethnicity and language
* Lua people, of Laos
* Lawa people, of Thailand sometimes referred t ...
could consist primarily of basic routines to execute code, manipulate data or handle errors while an API for an
object-oriented language, such as Java, would provide a specification of classes and its
class methods.
Hyrum's law states that "With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody." Meanwhile, several studies show that most applications that use an API tend to use a small part of the API. API use actually varies depending on the number of users, as well as on the popularity of the API.
Language bindings are also APIs. By mapping the features and capabilities of one language to an interface implemented in another language, a language binding allows a library or service written in one language to be used when developing in another language.
Tools such as
SWIG
The Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator (SWIG) is an open-source software tool used to connect computer programs or libraries written in C or C++ with scripting languages such as Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Tcl, and other language ...
and F2PY, a
Fortran-to-
Python interface generator, facilitate the creation of such interfaces.
An API can also be related to a
software framework
In computer programming, a software framework is an abstraction in which software, providing generic functionality, can be selectively changed by additional user-written code, thus providing application-specific software. It provides a standard ...
: a framework can be based on several libraries implementing several APIs, but unlike the normal use of an API, the access to the behavior built into the framework is mediated by extending its content with new classes plugged into the framework itself.
Moreover, the overall program flow of control can be out of the control of the caller and in the framework's hands by
inversion of control or a similar mechanism.
Operating systems
An API can specify the interface between an application and the
operating system.
POSIX, for example, provides a set of common API specifications that aim to enable an application written for a POSIX conformant operating system to be
compiled for another POSIX conformant operating system.
Linux and
Berkeley Software Distribution
The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...
are examples of operating systems that implement the POSIX APIs.
Microsoft has shown a strong commitment to a backward-compatible API, particularly within its
Windows API (Win32) library, so older applications may run on newer versions of Windows using an executable-specific setting called "Compatibility Mode".
An API differs from an
application binary interface (ABI) in that an API is source code based while an ABI is
binary based. For instance,
POSIX provides APIs while the
Linux Standard Base provides an ABI.
Remote APIs
Remote APIs allow developers to manipulate remote resources through
protocols, specific standards for communication that allow different technologies to work together, regardless of language or platform.
For example, the Java Database Connectivity API allows developers to query many different types of
databases with the same set of functions, while the
Java remote method invocation API uses the Java Remote Method Protocol to allow
invocation of functions that operate remotely but appear local to the developer.
Therefore, remote APIs are useful in maintaining the object abstraction in
object-oriented programming; a
method call
A method in object-oriented programming (OOP) is a procedure associated with a message and an object. An object consists of ''state data'' and ''behavior''; these compose an ''interface'', which specifies how the object may be utilized by any of ...
, executed locally on a
proxy object, invokes the corresponding method on the remote object, using the remoting protocol, and acquires the result to be used locally as a return value.
A modification of the proxy object will also result in a corresponding modification of the remote object.
Web APIs
Web APIs are a service accessed from client devices (Mobile Phones, Laptop, etc.) to a web server using the
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Client devices send a request in the form of an HTTP request, and are met with a response message usually in JavaScript Object Notation (
JSON
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other ser ...
) or Extensible Markup Language (
XML) format. Developers typically use Web APIs to query a server for a specific set of data from that server.
An example might be a shipping company API that can be added to an eCommerce-focused website to facilitate ordering shipping services and automatically include current shipping rates, without the site developer having to enter the shipper's rate table into a web database. While "web API" historically has been virtually synonymous with
web service, the recent trend (so-called
Web 2.0) has been moving away from Simple Object Access Protocol (
SOAP) based web services and
service-oriented architecture (SOA) towards more direct
representational state transfer (REST) style
web resources and
resource-oriented architecture (ROA). Part of this trend is related to the
Semantic Web movement toward
Resource Description Framework The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard originally designed as a data model for metadata. It has come to be used as a general method for description and exchange of graph data. RDF provides a variety of ...
(RDF), a concept to promote web-based
ontology engineering technologies. Web APIs allow the combination of multiple APIs into new applications known as
mashup
Mashup may refer to:
* Mashup (culture), the rearrangement of spliced parts of musical pieces as part of a subculture
* Mashup (education), combining various forms of data and media by a teacher or student in an instructional setting
* Mashup (mus ...
s.
In the social media space, web APIs have allowed web communities to facilitate sharing content and data between communities and applications. In this way, content that is created in one place dynamically can be posted and updated to multiple locations on the web.
[
] For example, Twitter's REST API allows developers to access core Twitter data and the Search API provides methods for developers to interact with Twitter Search and trends data.
Design
The design of an API has a significant impact on its usage.
First of all, the design of programming interfaces represents an important part of
software architecture, the organization of a complex piece of software.
The principle of
information hiding describes the role of programming interfaces as enabling
modular programming by hiding the implementation details of the modules so that users of modules need not understand the complexities inside the modules.
Aside from the previous underlying principle, other metrics for measuring the usability of an API may include properties such as functional efficiency, overall correctness, and learnability for novices. One straightforward and commonly adopted way of designing APIs is to follow
Nielsen's heuristic evaluation guidelines. The
Factory method pattern is also typical in designing APIs due to their reusable nature. Thus, the design of an API attempts to provide only the tools a user would expect.
Synchronous versus asynchronous
An application programming interface can be
synchronous or asynchronous. A synchronous API call is a design pattern where the call site is blocked while waiting for the called code to finish. With a asynchronous API call, however, the call site is not blocked while waiting for the called code to finish, and instead the calling thread is notified when the reply arrives.
Security
API security is very critical when developing a public facing API. Common threats include
SQL injection,
Denial-of-service attack (DoS), broken authentication, and exposing sensitive data. Without ensuring proper security practices bad actors can get access to information they should not have or even gain privileges to make changes to your server. Some common security practices include proper connection security using
HTTPS, content security to mitigate data injection attacks, and requiring an API key to use your service. Many public facing API services require you to use an assigned API key, and will refuse to serve data without sending the key with your request.
Release policies
APIs are one of the more common ways technology companies integrate. Those that provide and use APIs are considered as being members of a business ecosystem.
The main policies for releasing an API are:
*
Private: The API is for internal company use only.
*
Partner: Only specific business partners can use the API. For example,
vehicle for hire companies such as
Uber and
Lyft allow approved third-party developers to directly order rides from within their apps. This allows the companies to exercise quality control by curating which apps have access to the API and provides them with an additional revenue stream.
*
Public: The API is available for use by the public. For example,
Microsoft makes the
Windows API public, and
Apple releases its API
Cocoa
Cocoa may refer to:
Chocolate
* Chocolate
* ''Theobroma cacao'', the cocoa tree
* Cocoa bean, seed of ''Theobroma cacao''
* Chocolate liquor, or cocoa liquor, pure, liquid chocolate extracted from the cocoa bean, including both cocoa butter and ...
so that software can be written for their
platforms. Not all public APIs are generally accessible by everybody. For example, Internet service providers like Cloudflare or Voxility, use
RESTful APIs to allow customers and resellers access to their infrastructure information, DDoS stats, network performance, or dashboard controls.
Access to such APIs is granted either by "API tokens", or customer status validations.
Public API implications
An important factor when an API becomes public is its "interface stability". Changes to the API—for example adding new parameters to a function call—could break compatibility with the clients that depend on that API.
When parts of a publicly presented API are subject to change and thus not stable, such parts of a particular API should be documented explicitly as "unstable". For example, in the
Google Guava library, the parts that are considered unstable, and that might change soon, are marked with the
Java annotation @Beta
.
A public API can sometimes declare parts of itself as ''deprecated'' or rescinded. This usually means that part of the API should be considered a candidate for being removed, or modified in a backward incompatible way. Therefore, these changes allow developers to transition away from parts of the API that will be removed or not supported in the future.
Client code may contain innovative or opportunistic usages that were not intended by the API designers. In other words, for a library with a significant user base, when an element becomes part of the public API, it may be used in diverse ways.
On February 19, 2020,
Akamai published their annual "State of the Internet" report, showcasing the growing trend of cybercriminals targeting public API platforms at financial services worldwide. From December 2017 through November 2019, Akamai witnessed 85.42 billion credential violation attacks. About 20%, or 16.55 billion, were against hostnames defined as API endpoints. Of these, 473.5 million have targeted financial services sector organizations.
Documentation
API documentation describes the services an API offers and how to use those services, aiming to cover everything a client would need to know for practical purposes.
Documentation is crucial for the development and maintenance of applications using the API.
API documentation is traditionally found in documentation files but can also be found in social media such as blogs, forums, and Q&A websites.
Traditional documentation files are often presented via a documentation system, such as Javadoc or Pydoc, that has a consistent appearance and structure.
However, the types of content included in the documentation differ from API to API.
In the interest of clarity, API documentation may include a description of classes and methods in the API as well as "typical usage scenarios, code snippets, design rationales, performance discussions, and contracts", but implementation details of the API services themselves are usually omitted.
Restrictions and limitations on how the API can be used are also covered by the documentation. For instance, documentation for an API function could note that its parameters cannot be null, or that the function itself is not
thread safe Thread safety is a computer programming concept applicable to multi-threaded code. Thread-safe code only manipulates shared data structures in a manner that ensures that all threads behave properly and fulfill their design specifications without uni ...
.
Because API documentation tends to be comprehensive, it is a challenge for writers to keep the documentation updated and for users to read it carefully, potentially yielding bugs.
Reference documentation for a REST API can be generated automatically from an OpenAPI document, which is a machine-readable text file that uses a prescribed format and syntax defined in the
OpenAPI Specification. The OpenAPI document defines basic information such as the API's name and description, as well as describing operations the API provides access to.
API documentation can be enriched with metadata information like
Java annotations. This metadata can be used by the compiler, tools, and by the ''run-time'' environment to implement custom behaviors or custom handling.
It is possible to generate API documentation in a data-driven manner. By observing many programs that use a given API, it is possible to infer the typical usages, as well the required contracts and directives. Then, templates can be used to generate natural language from the mined data.
Dispute over copyright protection for APIs
In 2010, Oracle Corporation sued Google for having distributed a new implementation of Java embedded in the Android operating system. Google had not acquired any permission to reproduce the Java API, although permission had been given to the similar OpenJDK project. Google had approached Oracle to negotiate a license for their API, but were turned down due to trust issues. Despite the disagreement, Google chose to use Oracle's code anyway. Judge
William Alsup ruled in the ''Oracle v. Google'' case that APIs cannot be
copyrighted in the U.S and that a victory for Oracle would have widely expanded copyright protection to a "functional set of symbols" and allowed the copyrighting of simple software commands:
Alsup's ruling was overturned in 2014 on appeal to the
Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, though the question of whether such use of APIs constitutes
fair use was left unresolved.
In 2016, following a two-week trial, a jury determined that Google's reimplementation of the Java API constituted
fair use, but Oracle vowed to appeal the decision. Oracle won on its appeal, with the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruling that Google's use of the APIs did not qualify for fair use.
In 2019, Google appealed to the
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...
over both the copyrightability and fair use rulings, and the Supreme Court granted review.
Due to the
COVID-19 pandemic, the oral hearings in the case were delayed until October 2020.
The case was decided by the Supreme Court in Google's favor with a ruling of 6–2. Justice
Stephen Breyer
Stephen Gerald Breyer ( ; born August 15, 1938) is a retired American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1994 until his retirement in 2022. He was nominated by President Bill Clinton, and repl ...
delivered the opinion of the court and at one point mentioned that "The declaring code is, if copyrightable at all, further than are most computer programs from the core of copyright." This means the code used in APIs are more similar to dictionaries than novels in terms of copyright protection.
Examples
*
ASPI for
SCSI
Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, electrical, optical and logical interface ...
device interfacing
*
Cocoa
Cocoa may refer to:
Chocolate
* Chocolate
* ''Theobroma cacao'', the cocoa tree
* Cocoa bean, seed of ''Theobroma cacao''
* Chocolate liquor, or cocoa liquor, pure, liquid chocolate extracted from the cocoa bean, including both cocoa butter and ...
and
Carbon for the
Macintosh
*
DirectX
Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...
for
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
*
EHLLAPI
*
Java APIs
*
ODBC
In computing, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a standard application programming interface (API) for accessing database management systems (DBMS). The designers of ODBC aimed to make it independent of database systems and operating systems. An ...
for
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
*
OpenAL cross-platform sound API
*
OpenCL cross-platform API for general-purpose computing for CPUs & GPUs
*
OpenGL
OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...
cross-platform graphics API
*
OpenMP API that supports multi-platform shared memory multiprocessing programming in C, C++, and Fortran on many architectures, including Unix and Microsoft Windows platforms.
*
Server application programming interface (SAPI)
*
Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL)
See also
*
API testing
API testing is a type of software testing that involves testing application programming interfaces (APIs) directly and as part of integration testing to determine if they meet expectations for functionality, reliability, performance, and security. ...
*
API writer
*
Augmented web WebAR, previously known as the Augmented Web, is a web technology that allows for augmented reality functionality within a web browser. It is a combination of HTML5, Web Audio, WebGL, and WebRTC..
From 2020s more known as web-based Augmented Reali ...
*
Calling convention
*
Common Object Request Broker Architecture
The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) designed to facilitate the communication of systems that are deployed on diverse platforms. CORBA enables collaboration between sys ...
(CORBA)
*
Comparison of application virtual machines
*
Document Object Model (DOM)
*
Double-chance function
*
Foreign function interface
*
Front and back ends
*
Interface (computing)
In computing, an interface is a shared boundary across which two or more separate components of a computer system exchange information. The exchange can be between software, computer hardware, peripheral devices, humans, and combinations of these ...
*
Interface control document An interface control document (ICD) in systems engineering
and software engineering, provides a record of all interface information (such as drawings, diagrams, tables, and textual information) generated for a project. The underlying interface doc ...
*
List of 3D graphics APIs
3D graphics have become so popular, particularly in video games, that specialized APIs (application programming interfaces) have been created to ease the processes in all stages of computer graphics generation. These APIs have also proved vital t ...
*
Microservices
*
Name mangling
*
Open API
*
Open Service Interface Definitions
*
Parsing
*
Plugin
*
RAML (software)
RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML) is a YAML-based language for describing static APIs (but not REST APIs). It provides all the information necessary to describe APIs on the level 2 of the Richardson Maturity Model. Although designed with RES ...
*
Software development kit (SDK)
*
Web API
*
Web content vendor
Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design (UI design); authoring, including standardised code an ...
*
XPCOM
References
Further reading
* Argues that "APIs are far from neutral tools" and form a key part of contemporary programming, understood as a fundamental part of culture.
What is an API?– in the U.S. Supreme
Court opinion
In law, a legal opinion is in certain jurisdictions a written explanation by a judge or group of judges that accompanies an order or ruling in a case, laying out the rationale and legal principles for the ruling.
Opinions are in those jurisdic ...
,
Google v. Oracle 2021, pp. 3–7 – "For each task, there is
computer code; API (also known as
Application Program Interface) is the method for calling that '
computer code' (instruction – like a
recipe
A recipe is a set of instructions that describes how to prepare or make something, especially a dish of prepared food. A sub-recipe or subrecipe is a recipe for an ingredient that will be called for in the instructions for the main recipe.
His ...
– rather than cooking instruction, this is
machine
A machine is a physical system using Power (physics), power to apply Force, forces and control Motion, movement to perform an action. The term is commonly applied to artificial devices, such as those employing engines or motors, but also to na ...
instruction) to be carry out"
Maury, Innovation and Change– Cory Ondrejka \ February 28, 2014 \ " ...proposed a public API to let computers talk to each other".
URL)
External links
Forrester : IT industry : API Case : Google v. Oracle– May 20, 2021 – content format: Audio with text – length 26:41
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Technical communication