Edit: Thank you for all of your answers. I feel I have a much better understanding of what’s going on. Hope to see y’all on the other side of this.
In: 241
First I’ll define an API. In basic terms an API is a connection something on the internet. They’re pretty much like hidden urls on a website that return information instead of a page.
There are a few types: Get, Post, Put, and Delete.
Get is for, you guessed it, getting data. I.e. you open the reddit homepage and a get request is made for a list of posts to show on the homepage. You click on a post and another Get request is made to get the description and comments of that specific post.
Post is for creating ‘something’. It could be a post (coincidentally) or a comment, or a new account.
Put is usually used for updating things, i.e. maybe editing a post or comment.
Delete is again you guessed it, for deleting something.
Tens to Hundreds of APIs are created when you visit any website and you can see all of them by opening the network tab in your browser (I won’t go into that).
On the topic of subscriptions. Some websites will have APIs specifically for other developers to use and will charge a subscription to use them. They’ll allow you to do special things such as train an AI or create Twitter bots to post for you. Or as others have mentioned the weather provider might charge a subscription for apple to use their data in their widget.
Latest Answers