Application Programming Interface

An Application Programming Interface (API) specifies how software components should communicate. It defines the kinds of requests that can be made, how to make them, the data formats that should be used, etc. There are a few types of APIs but the most common is REST.

REST (which stands for Representational State Transfer) is an API type that is used mainly on the web. We call APIs that use REST, RESTful APIs.

Example

We need to show a map on our site, let’s use the Google Maps API.

Further Reading

• Wikipedia article

Synonyms

• programming interface

Abbreviation

• API