What is exactly API and why we call it like that? I am learning web development, and always come across APIs. I would love to learn it through an analogy.
In: Engineering
APIs are one way computers share data.
Take a finance website. If you, a human, browse to
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG
you get a human friendly HTML response with words, charts, colors etc showing you all you want to know about Google stock.
Now if you are a computer or a program some developer like yourself wrote and you need that same data, you don’t want pretty formatted text and pictures and stuff targeted for humans (HTML). You want the same info but presented in a way that is easier for a computer program to digest.
Usually in JSON format. Like this
https://query1.finance.yahoo.com/v8/finance/chart/goog
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