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
API (application programming interface) is a general term for the instruction manual for communicating with some program. It could be any program from low level stuff on your computer like the operating system to programming languages themselves (aka the compiler) to web hosted services. If you’re looking at “web APIs” then that would be more specifically any service that someone has made accessible via the internet. So a little confusingly people call the web service itself an API, even though technically speaking an API is just the set of instructions for communicating with the web service.
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