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
You want to bake a cake, and there is a stack of recipes in a binder, but the binder isn’t yours. You can’t open it and just browse.
You can however ask the binder to give you recipes that fit your purpose. For this consulting the binder gives you an application with standard questions. You fill in the questionnaire and the binder gives you back a bunch of recipes that fit your query. All the recipes have the same format, a template, so you can easily redistribute any recipe that comes out of the binder.
The bits in the middle: the questionnaire you filled in and the standard template for the recipe are the API. You know how the questionnaire looks and the answer template. So you can reuse this over and over because if you now want to make a chicken pot, you need to give this and this info in that form and you will get back a stack of recipes that all are formatted identically.
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