According to accomplished experts, an API is a set of rules and tools for initiating and governing how business workloads interact. Now, with the faster proliferation of the cloud, the interaction level has gone up and beyond business applications. That is, scores of IT optimization and automation services also have to interact with one another in order to simplify and streamline business-process automation. APIs have to uniquely and uniformly find one another, initiate data interchange, and verify information for software applications to leverage one another for their business benefits. Let's use a few comparisons to explain APIs and their roles and responsibilities in our increasingly connected world.
If applications were vehicles on the road, APIs would be the traffic rules. The rules prescribe how vehicles must behave on the road.
If applications were food items, APIs would be recipes. APIs specify and govern how various ingredients fuse together to create tasty and trendy meals.
If applications were houses, APIs would be the blueprint, which articulate how different construction artifacts blend to form a house.
Why have APIs become a mainstream concept?
Having understood the crucial roles of APIs in our increasingly software-defined and -designed world, faster API production becomes a crucial task for API developers. That is, forming appropriate rules for the intended success of the APIs is vital. API designers create and publish APIs, which allow other applications to find and interact with them.
Suppose you are exposing one or more customer-facing web and mobile applications that run on cloud environments. These applications are diligently being fitted with one or more APIs. Now, having API-attached applications enables other developers to build their own applications that can easily be integrated with the web and mobile applications. This integration makes applications bigger and better. Implementing business processes becomes easier, faster, risk-free, and rewarding. The customer experience with the omni-channel aggregation capability goes up significantly. There's no need for a web-scale company to devise and design APIs. Even for an idea, an application gets built and decorated with a simple API. Application developers are becoming accustomed to creating and sustaining APIs in order to expose their applications to a larger audience.
As we've emphasized several times, application integration becomes simpler with APIs. There were other options for enterprise integration, but they were insufficient in many ways. APIs have emerged as the standard for process integration. When an API designer releases an officially accepted and clearly defined set of rules, others can confidently embark on API-inspired application and platform integration. Thus, APIs provide fresh possibilities and opportunities. APIs grant developers the requisite power to control not only what others can do with their applications, but also prescribe what others can't do with their applications.