#Brian proffitt readwrite software#
Whatever the metaphor, APIs clearly define exactly how a program will interact with the rest of the software world-saving time, resources and potentially nasty legal entanglements along the way.
#Brian proffitt readwrite free#
Who has the time to comb through all the code for somebody else’s application-which, trust me, can be awfully messy-just to use one function? (It’s also possible to run into tricky licensing issues if you’re not careful.)ĪPIs simplify all that by limiting outside program access to a specific set of features-often enough, requests for data of one sort or another. Feel free to think of them as doors, windows or levers if you like. That’s true even for open-source programs.
That makes it possible for applications to share data and take actions on one another’s behalf without requiring developers to share all of their software’s code. Code-sharing on that scale wouldn’t just ruffle the feathers of programmers who’d rather keep it secret it would also be grossly inefficient. Think about the way Yelp, for instance, displays nearby restaurants on a Google Map in its app, or the way some video games now let players chat, post high scores and invite friends to play via Facebook, right there in the middle of a game.ĪPIs do all this by “exposing” some of a program’s internal functions to the outside world in a limited fashion. On the Web, APIs make it possible for big services like Google Maps or Facebook to let other apps “piggyback” on their offerings. System-level APIs makes it possible for applications like LibreOffice to run on top of an OS like Windows in the first place. APIs aren’t at all new whenever you use a desktop or laptop, APIs are what make it possible to move information between programs-for instance, by cutting and pasting a snippet of a LibreOffice document into an Excel spreadsheet. In the simplest terms, APIs are sets of requirements that govern how one application can talk to another.
But the rest of you may well be wondering: What are APIs, and why do we care so much about them? If you work with APIs, you already know why they’re important. I’ve even put forth the notion of getting my own API. Here at ReadWrite, for instance, we’ve recently discussed Google’s flip-flops on the open Calendar API and why Pinterest hasn’t made its APIs public yet. It’s getting harder to turn around in tech without bumping into some reference to APIs, or application programming interfaces.
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