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
Pretend that you own a bakery. A customer might call in and say “I want 12 chocolate chip cookies” or they might say “I want a vanilla birthday cake with my daughter’s name and age on it”. There are a lot of different things that they could order, and different orders might require different pieces of information from the customer.
An API is like a listing of all of the different things that you can order, along with all of the required information and options that go along with each kind of order. So an API for your bakery might look like:
Chocolate Chip Cookies:
– specify the number of cookies you want.
Birthday Cake:
– specify the flavor of the cake, the flavor of the frosting, and the message you want written on the top of the cake. Optionally, you can specify the age of the person and we will put that many candles on top of the cake.
So this is an API that ensures that both sides can communicate and know what is required of them, and what they can expect from the other side when they are doing business with each other.
The big difference here is that a real world API is meant for computers to do business with each other, not really for people, and instead of doing business 1 request at a time computers tend to do a lot of requests really fast. So instead of the customer paying the bakery per order, they would work out a deal where they can place some number of orders every month and pay for it all together. That is an API subscription.
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