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
You want to read a book that you don’t own. Your local bookstore has it, and is willing to let you use it, but wants you to pay them for access to their catalogue. You are the client, the bookstore is the server, and the front desk where you make the request and get the book is the API. Some services don’t actually charge anything, but pretty much everyone will, at some point, ask you to pay for their services.
An actual API example is, say I wanted to make an app that automatically reads out the tweets of the people I’m following on Twitter each morning. That means that the app that I make needs to ask Twitter for specific data every day. Just like a real person going to the front desk of a bookstore to rent a book, my app needs to use an API to get data from Twitter. The concept is actually pretty straightforward. If I’m a company with data that other people will want to use, I need to create an API/front desk, and design it in a way that it’s straightforward for potential clients to use
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