APIs & Embedding

API  stands  for  ‘Application  Programming  Interface’,  and  is  a  way  of  structuring  a  software  system  so  that  it  has  an  outside  (its  ‘interface’)  and  an  inside ,where  all  sorts  of  complicated  technical  things  go  on,  which  most  people  do  not  need  to  care about.

With APIs, applications talk to each other without any user knowledge or intervention.  For example, when you buy movie tickets online and enter your credit card information, the movie ticket Web site uses an API to send your credit card information to a remote application that verifies whether your information is correct. Once payment is confirmed, the remote application sends a response back to the movie ticket Web site saying it’s OK to issue the tickets, this an example of web developers allowing users access to complex underlying functionality without having to literally go through the process of all the complexities that are involved inside.

This therefore lead me to say that both Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Web Services are similar, since they are both designed to be primarily machine readable and not human readable. Example Web services use (XML) which are extensible Mark-up language, which is designed to be read my machines, while the (HTML), Hypertext Makeup Language is what we as humans see on the outside, what we will call the website.

Embedding is done via a programming language called Java Script, which can be found on most recent browsers. This allows users to embed sophisticated programs into webpages which then gets its information from web services and then process that information and send it back to the user via the web page. This is all done via a Cloud, which are basically a huge set of hard drives filled with information, which all come together to form the web, which stores information in various places, hence why we call it a cloud, so each set of this information is then pieced together, via the web service, and is then reproduced via a website which then produces this language in an API via its outside (interface), which the user then sees on his/her web page.