Week 6 (Part2): Understanding APIs
APIs or Application Programming Interface is what allows the communication of information between programs possible. In relation to the HoloLens, APIs will be used to communicate between web servers such as Firebase and Unity3D.
What is an API?
These days, APIs are especially important because they dictate how developers can create new apps that tap into big Web services — social networks like Facebook or Pinterest, for instance, or utilities like Google Maps or Dropbox.5 The developer of a game app, for instance, can use the Dropbox API to let users store their saved games in the Dropbox cloud instead of working out some other cloud-storage option from scratch. (Readwrite, 2013)
An example of an API in use would be searching for restaurants using an app such as Foodora for Android and using their found locations in Google Maps rather than generating its own new map. Using Google Maps API, the Foodora app would be able to communicate the location it wants to plot and will send that information to an internal Google Maps address that will return a location pin.
ProgrammableWeb describe an API as user interface (UI), allowing software programs to talk to one another. As discussed above, APIs are highly beneficial to the efficiency in communication between programs. If we look at the analogy that ProgrammableWeb has provided:
- Through the standard interface, any compatible consumer (in this case, a device) can easily outsource its electrical requirements to the service, and the device can expect to get the same results. Knowing that electricity can be outsourced through a predictably available standard interface, device manufacturers can focus on making great devices and not on figuring out how those devices are going to get their power…
- Consuming-devices are easily moved from one socket to another. Thanks to a standard interface, moving a hair dryer from a home in Boston to a hotel in San Francisco is no different than moving it from your bedroom to your kitchen.…
- The electrical socket interface is a layer of abstraction (it hides the specifics) to the underlying service. The consumer (again, not a person but rather a device) is blind to things like the color of the wiring in the walls, other devices the wiring is shared with, how the electricity is generated or where those sources of power are located….
- The same transparency works both ways. To the service, all consumers look the same. It is essentially blind to the specifics of the consuming device that’s on the other side of the electrical socket.
I feel that these summarised analogies are a perfect way to look at APIs and are a great way to explain them and the benefits to utilising them. The APIs provide their consumers, in this case being desktop, mobile or web server apps, with similar benefits as the analogies above. A consuming device has the ability to outsource required information such as a restaurant location to an API.
Applications are able to outsource their requirements for data to “service providers across digital networks”. For example a mobile app would be able to outsource functionality that Google Maps provides with an interactive map through specialised APIs.
REFERENCES
ReadWrite. 2013. What APIs Are And Why They’re Important — ReadWrite. [ONLINE] Available at: http://readwrite.com/2013/09/19/api-defined/.
ProgrammableWeb. 2015. What are the Benefits of APIs? | ProgrammableWeb. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.programmableweb.com/news/what-are-benefits-apis/analysis/2015/12/03.
SearchCloudStorage. 2014. What is RESTful API? — Definition from WhatIs.com. [ONLINE] Available at: http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/definition/RESTful-API.
