Qlik's vision, even before releasing Qlik Sense, has been making its powerful associative data engine more easily accessible so it can be leveraged in any form or capacity a customer or project requires. As such, developers have invested heavily in the past couple of years in developing comprehensible application programming interface (APIs) to allow developers to communicate with the Qlik engine and its associated services.
With an API in place, developers can leverage the Qlik product in their way and build customized solutions on top of it or integrate it with existing platforms. There are practically no limits to how Qlik can be used, making it a tremendously powerful technology. At the same time, building solutions on top of an API requires notable development effort compared to Qlik Sense's user-friendly way of creating dashboards, using drag and drop.
This module of the book is mostly techy in order to address the questions and queries of developers coming from a web development background. Classic Qlik developers will still find benefit from reading the following chapters, as they will be able to understand, at least on a high level, how a Qlik API is designed, how it can be used, and what kind of methods it is using.
This chapter, in particular, will provide an overview of all available Qlik APIs that have been introduced with Qlik Sense and the Qlik Analytics Platform. It will guide the reader on which APIs to use for which purpose and how to navigate through the rich library of available methods. It is, however, important to note it is not intended to give you the same breadth and depth as comprehensive documentation. For this purpose, and for a deeper dive into the respective APIs, with many more rich examples, it is recommended to visit the official Qlik help page (https://help.qlik.com/) and the Qlik community (http://community.qlik.com/).
The topics that we will cover in this chapter include the following:
- What is an API?
- Description of Qlik APIs
- Extension API
- Backend API
- Capability API
- enigma.js
- Leonardo UI
- halyard.js