What are APIs? Types of APIs

APIs have been revolutionizing the world since the birth of first-generation computers but they were not coded in high-level languages as they are being done today. The APIs are core concepts of programming which every programmer has to learn for achieving working levels of proficiency. As of now, APIs have reached a high level of sophistication which needs to be classified into types of APIs to get a good level of understanding.

What are APIs? Types of APIs

APIs are an acronym for Application Programming Interface which means a set of functions and procedures allowing the creation of applications that access the features or data of other application, service or an operating system.

In layman terms, APIs are pipelines which connect applications these connections are done using the features of another application into the main application, In APIs types of messages, are defined which will be communicated through these APIs.

Read: "What is an API and How it works?"

For example, many websites show the live feed from twitter so they use APIs from twitter on their website to fetch and display the live feed.

Types of APIs

The classification of APIs can be done on three parameters which are listed as follows:

Ownership types of Web APIs

On Ownership level there are four main types of APIs:

• Open APIs: These APIs are publicly available to use like Oauth APIs from Google and there is no restriction to use them. Hence, they are also known as Public APIs.

• Partner APIs: Specific rights or licenses in order to access this type of API because they are not available to the public. Usually, these kinds of APIs are associated with paid services.

• Internal APIs: The APIs that are developed by companies to use into their internal systems so that they can enhance the productivity of development teams where one team can use services from another project of the company is called Internal APIs. These APIs are also known as Private APIs.

• Composite APIs: Both processes and composite APIS are a sequence of tasks but composite APIs combines different data and service APIs. It is a sequence of tasks that run synchronously as a result of the execution where the result of triggering of a Composite API is the result of the execution and not the request that will contain the result of the execution at the request of a task. Its main usage is to speed up the process of execution and improve the performance of the listeners in the web interfaces.

Communication level of APIs

Types of APIs