Appli­ca­tion Pro­gram­ming Inter­face

Glossary term descrip­tion
  • Also known as
  • API

Appli­ca­tion Pro­gram­ming Inter­face (API ) refers to a spe­cial inter­face pro­vided by soft­ware appli­ca­tions . An API allows users or other appli­ca­tions to con­nect to the sys­tem and per­form a num­ber of dis­crete actions such as run­ning func­tions and meth­ods, request­ing data, or updat­ing infor­ma­tion.

APIs may allow for the inte­gra­tion of its appli­ca­tions into appli­ca­tion net­works, data work­flows and process autom­a­ti­za­tion.

Most mod­ern web appli­ca­tions offer APIs to exchange infor­ma­tion with other web ser­vices.

Depend­ing on the set of avail­able func­tions and the data for­mat web APIs use, the most com­mon API types are SOAP API , RPC API  and REST API .