Since our childhood we have heard that “Impossible is nothing” and day by day we are convinced that this statement is true. New technologies and new possibilities make a new world which surprises with novelties that help us in all spheres of our life. Some things that were considered as unreal and crazy, became the routine and common now. There is no doubt that the Internet is the leader in the developmental area and software which is worked out for its users really amazes.
On February 7, 2000 Salesforce, a business software company, presented an intermediary that has become a considerable breakthrough in the data share issues. Application Programming Interface (API) was its name and it provided the developers a possibility to get access to the information easier and quicker than ever before. Since that time more and more companies have started to create their APIs and now the list of its users include such popular resources as Amazon, Flickr, Facebook, Google, Foursquare, Instagram.
API has a number of protocol types that differ in its transfer peculiarities. They are:
- REST. Representational State Transfer is widely used and considered as the easiest among all the protocols. It doesn’t really have any setup standards and ignores the details of data implementations as well as syntax. However, its main focus is on the role of elements and interaction between the others.
- SOAP. Simple Object Access Protocol doesn’t have such popularity as the previous one and its share is 26%. It is used for sending the messages or small amounts of data using HTTP. Also, SOAP tunnels easily over firewalls and proxies, however, the process occurs to be slow.
- JAVASCRIPT/ XML-RPC. This protocol has a raw of advantages like one method of serialization and security simplicity. Its functionality is a bit similar to REST’s JSON.
Below you can find a detailed infographic published by SmartFile. It provides you with more interesting information considering the principles of work and rates of growth of Application Programming Interface that surely became a hand of help for many programmers.
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