Companies can only achieve this by finding a way to break down information silos. Thus, enabling teams to aggregate relevant and useful information for decision-making. B2B integration is one What is API of the more common uses of APIs that is on the rise. According to Gartner, by 2023, over 50% of B2B transactions will be performed through real-time API calls versus traditional approaches.
Consisting of routines, protocols, and tools for specifying how software components interact, the first APIs were built without templates. But as businesses began to look at APIs more strategically, modern APIs have taken on characteristics that make them more valuable. GRPC stands for Google Remote Procedure Call and is an open-source data exchange technology. It allows client applications to communicate with service endpoints over Google Cloud Platform products. Even more than that, enterprise systems increasingly start supporting APIs as enterprise IT infrastructure is getting more and more interconnected.
What are the different types of APIs, and how are they used?
This list is far from exhaustive, and it will keep growing as developers continue to create innovative solutions that change the ways we live, work, and interact with one another. APIs are essential to the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, which includes devices such as smart watches, fitness trackers, doorbells, and home appliances. Without APIs, these devices would not be able to connect to the cloud—or to one another—which would render them useless. The world was introduced to Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android in 2007. The ability to carry the web in our pockets radically changed how we live—and spurred a massive investment in mobile applications that are powered by APIs. You won’t be able to hold your user’s hand through the API, and you shouldn’t have to.
Essentially, APIs are messengers that deliver requests and return responses between applications. Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and microservice architectures are both comprised of modular services that perform specific business functions, but they have several key differences. For instance, microservices communicate with one another through APIs, whereas SOA services rely on an enterprise service bus (ESB) for routing, transforming, and managing messages. Additionally, SOA services tend to use SOAP, whereas microservices tend to use lightweight protocols like REST. Finally, SOA services are less granular than microservices, and they may also be dependent on one another. API development is an iterative and collaborative process, so it’s important to leverage the appropriate tooling to ensure everything runs as smoothly as possible.
Security
More than just checking types, ensuring that the data is what it is supposed to be can eliminate many potential problems. Understanding your boundaries and what you do and don’t have control over is an important aspect of validation. This allows the API to focus on function and not roles or users. The identity access management service can relate roles and users to scopes, then provide the scopes to the client in a verified JWT. You need access to that information from the airline’s database, whether you’re interacting with it from the website or an online travel service that aggregates information from multiple airlines.
