An Application Program Interface (API), is a set of routines and tools for building software that allows it to communicate with other software. This term encompasses a lot of different tasks and interfaces - even copy and paste on your computer could be called an API.
In this section, you're going to focus on APIs that allow your script to gather information from the internet to build dynamic applications. As part of this process, you are going to build a website that communicates with a few APIs, to collect data from other websites and display it.
How to Use the Developer Tools
In the network tab of the developers tools, you can see all the requests that are made from any website you are visiting. See how many pop up when you type in a search term in Google and click on a link that takes you to YouTube. Its incredible!
In the example above, the search results page and the YouTube page are constantly sending requests to other Google services, or third-party services for pieces of content for that webpage. The thumbnails for example, or the video preview, or sending your mouse data to Google, or tracking your view time, or deciding which ad to show you. The internet is a huge mess of interrelated services, protocols, companies, servers, and people like you, and they all need to communicate somehow. APIs is how.
In this final section of the course, you will be dealing with sending out requests to other services and websites for information, and displaying that information on a webpage you will host on GitHub. Thus showing you a vital piece of the grand emergent system that is the internet.
Summary: What Is an API (Application Programming Interface)
- An API is a set of routines and tools for building software that allows it to communicate with other software
- In the network tab of the developers tools, you can see all the requests that are made from any website you are visiting