DEV Community: Hardik kumar

History of APIs

Hardik kumar — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 07:15:13 +0000

The term "Application Program Interface" first appeared in a paper called Data structures and techniques for remote computer graphics presented at an AFIPS (American Federation of Information Processing Societies) conference in 1968. It was used to describe the interaction of an application with the rest of the computer system.

In 1974, API was introduced in a paper called The Relational and Network Approaches: Comparison of the Application Programming Interface. APIs then became part of the ANSI/SPARC framework. It's an abstract design standard for DBMS (Database Management Systems) proposed in 1975.

By 1990, the API was defined simply as a set of services available to a programmer for performing certain tasks. As Computer Networks became common in the 1970s and 1980s, programmers wanted to call libraries located not only on their local computers but on computers located elsewhere.

In the 2000s, E-Commerce and information sharing were new and booming. This was when Salesforce, eBay, and Amazon launched their own APIs to expand their impact by making their information more shareable and accessible for the developers.

Salesforce, in 2000, introduced an enterprise-class, web-based automation tool which was the beginning of the SaaS (Software as a Service) revolution.

eBay's APIs in 2000 benefited how goods are sold on the web.

Amazon, in 2002, introduced AWS (Amazon Web Services) which allowed developers to incorporate Amazon's content and features into their own websites. For the first time, e-commerce and data sharing were openly accessible to a wide range of developers.

During this time, the concept of REST (Representational State), a software architectural style, was introduced. The concept was meant to standardize software architecture across the web and help applications easily communicate with each other.

As time passed, APIs helped more and more people connect with each other. Between 2003 and 2006, four major developments happened that changed the way we use the internet.

In 2003, Delicious introduced a service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. In 2004, Flickr launched a place to store, organize, and share digital photos online from where developers could easily embed their photos on web pages and social media. These two quickly became popular choices for the emerging social media movement.

In 2006, Facebook launched its API which gave users an unpredictable amount of data from photos and profiles information to friend lists and events. It helped Facebook become the most popular social media platform of that time. Twitter, in the same year, introduced its own API as developers were increasingly scraping data from its site. Facebook and Twitter dominated social media, overtaking the population of which APIs were the backbone. At the same time, Google launched its Google Maps APIs to share the massive amount of geographical data they had collected.

By this time, the world was shifting towards smartphones, people were engaging more and more with their phones and with the online world. These APIs changed the way how people interacted with the internet.

In 2008, Twilio was formed and it was the first company to make API their entire product. They had introduced an API that could communicate via5 phone to make and receive calls or send texts.

In 2010, Instagram launched its photo-sharing app which became popular within a month as social media was booming. Later, as users complained about the lack of Instagram APIs, they introduced their private API.

By this time, developers had also started to think of IoT (Internet of Things), a way to connect our day-to-day devices with the internet. APIs started to reach our cameras, speakers, microphones, watches, and many more day-to-day devices.

In 2014, Amazon launched Alexa as a smart speaker which could play songs, talk to you, make a to-do list, set alarms, stream podcasts, play audiobooks, and provide weather, traffic, sports, and other real-time updates as you command.

In 2017, Fitbit was established which delivered a wide range of wearable devices that could measure our steps count, heart rate, quality of sleep, and various other fitness metrics. It connected our health with the cloud.

As we began connecting increasingly with the internet, privacy and security concerns started to show up. The year 2018 was the year of privacy concerns. People started to think about their data being shared among large organizations without their permission and it could be misused.

An example of users' data being misused could be Facebook's API when one developer discovered that they could use their API to create a quiz that collected personal data from Facebook users and their friend networks and then sold that data to a political consulting firm. This scandal exposed the Dark side of APIs. This made users realize that these APIs aren't free, these large organizations are earning by selling their data with other organizations.
In the year 2020, people started to see Web3.0 as a solution to all the privacy concerns as it is based on Blockchain.

As the world is progressing, we are becoming more and more dependent on these APIs to make our lives comfortable. There is still a lot that we are yet to know about the limits of APIs. The future definitely has endless possibilities.

How did I get to know about APIs?

Hardik kumar — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 14:53:40 +0000

Who should read: Young minds who want to get started with APIs.

...

Before I actually integrated an API in my application, the term “API” sounded like a*n un-understandable term* to understand for a noob developer like me.

Today, whenever building a full-fledged application with my team, I always think about what APIs would be needed for the application. I also get annoyed if I don’t get proper documentation of those APIs.

I, a noob developer, was able to understand the actual meaning of that un-understandable term after I integrated it with an application.

But I see plenty of my friends who don’t understand what API actually means. They seem confused while explaining it to me.

Hey.. Don’t You Worry!

That’s the reason I’m here for. I’ll explain to you:

How do we use these APIs in our daily life
What does the term API mean
Why do need API in our lives
How an actual API looks like

...

1. How do we use these APIs in our daily life?

Trust me, we do use APIs in our daily life!

Let’s start with some common APIs that we all use in our everyday. The most prominent example would be:

a. Login Authentication on various websites. You must have seen the buttons saying “Login with Google”, “Login with Facebook”, and “Login with Apple” along with the normal Email and Password login fields.

Login page of Spotify

They are so convenient to use, isn’t it? They don’t ask for your email or password, you just have to click on it, and boom! you’re authenticated. How cool is that? and who remembers their password anyway. I always go for the “forgot password” option if not with Google, Facebook, or Apple authentication.

So, wherever you see these “Login with XYZ Company”, it means that XYZ Company has provided their APIs to authenticate users through their database.

b. Ecommerce Payments — If you have ever bought something from any e-commerce website, you’ve definitely seen different options for payment like GPay, PhonePe, and PayTM under the UPI section, right?

Payment options in Flipkart

So why do you see GPay, PhonePe, and PayTM on all the e-commerce websites while you pay for the product?

It’s because these companies have provided their APIs which the e-commerce companies use to make their payment process simple.

c. Google Map Directions — Let’s say you’ve ordered something through your food delivery app like Zomato or Swiggy. Now you will be able to see your delivery person’s location, so, how is this happening?

Order tracking page of a Food delivery app

So the map that you’re watching on your mobile is provided by Google Maps and your food delivery app is asking for your delivery person’s current location from Google Maps. Hence with the help of APIs, Google Maps is able to send that particular data to your mobile.

...

2. What does the term API mean?

By definition, an API or Application Programming Interface is a connection between two computer programs.

In simpler terms, API is a middleman that carries the data between the application and the database.

Let’s understand this line using the most popular example of a customer ordering some food in a restaurant.

Imagine you’re sitting at a table in a restaurant with a menu of choices to order from. The kitchen is the part of the “system” that will prepare your order. What is missing is the critical link to communicate your order to the kitchen and deliver your food back to your table. That’s where the waiter or API comes in. The waiter is the messenger — or API — that takes your request or order and tells the kitchen — the system — what to do. Then the waiter delivers the response back to you, in this case, it is the food.

In technical terms, if we talk about a website, API is software that connects the frontend(the web pages that you see and interact with) of any website to its database so that the data on the database could be shown on the website. And also the data on the database could be added, modified, or deleted using the frontend of the website.

Still, there is more to it, let’s understand that in the next part.

...

3. Why do need API in our lives?

An API is needed to connect an application to a database.

Here, I used “a database”, which means that APIs can access any database as soon as they have permission to access that database.

Let’s take an example of Amazon, you see a bunch of products on their home page, they have over 12 million products in their own database.

To show a product’s data on their website:

They have to request the API to get a particular data from the database
Then that API requests the database to provide that particular data
Once received, API gives back the same data to the frontend that is being received from the database.

This is how an application connects to its own database.

Now talking about connecting with other databases!

As I’ve mentioned earlier, e-commerce has UPI as one of its payment methods. So what happens here is that the actual payment happens through the company you choose to pay to Amazon. Let’s say you chose PayTM, so you are actually doing a normal UPI payment to Amazon just like you do UPI payment to any other person.

Now for Amazon to check if the transaction has happened:

It requests PayTM’s API to check if a particular user has paid the required money to Amazon or not
Then that API requests the same to PayTM’s database
If the database responds with a yes, the API tells Amazon that the user has paid the amount. That’s it!

That’s all the processes that happen behind the scenes.

And now you know how API connects an application with their own database as well as other companies’ databases too.

...

4. How an actual API looks like?

There is a public API provided by imgflip that anyone can use in their personal project, I would like you to check it out by yourself.

You see, that is how cluttered it looks in the first place. Let me just show it in a proper JSON format.

JSON(JavaScript Object Notation) is a standard text-based format for representing structured data.

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "memes": [
      {
        "id": "181913649",
        "name": "Drake Hotline Bling",
        "url": "https://i.imgflip.com/30b1gx.jpg",
        "width": 1200,
        "height": 1200,
        "box_count": 2
      },
      {
        "id": "87743020",
        "name": "Two Buttons",
        "url": "https://i.imgflip.com/1g8my4.jpg",
        "width": 600,
        "height": 908,
        "box_count": 3
      },
      {
        "id": "112126428",
        "name": "Distracted Boyfriend",
        "url": "https://i.imgflip.com/1ur9b0.jpg",
        "width": 1200,
        "height": 800,
        "box_count": 3
      },
      ...(more data)
    ]
  }
}

This particular API contains a lot of meme templates that you can display on your own project.

So, this is what all the “API responses” look like whether it’s an API created by Amazon or it’s created by a noob developer like me. It is basically a JSON file hosted online.

And this is what an “API request” looks like:

fetch('https://api.imgflip.com/get_memes')
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(json => console.log(json))

...

Yayyy! You’ve learned it!

Now you can explain the concept of APIs to your friends who are still confused about what exactly is an API and what it does.

If you find this blog insightful and want to know more about the components of API, stay tuned for the next blog!

If you want to get more gist around APIs, check out trending API tools:

Keploy.io — a no-code API testing platform.
Hoppscotch.io — an open-source API development ecosystem.
Postman.co — an API platform for building and using APIs.

My Local Hack Day 2021 Experience | Major Hacking League | Guild: Inaxia

Hardik kumar — Sat, 16 Jan 2021 13:55:48 +0000

It’s a great experience with all the tech enthusiasts, we come together every day and divide some amazing tasks among us and try to finish all of them with our full energy.

I am having a lot of fun attending the live stream with Ryan, Mary, Sashrika, Mara, and some cool people of MLH. I really like how they guide us in every challenge they give as well as entertain us throughout the week of LHD.

Every day I get to know some new skills and technologies and it really helps me build my profile.

This is the first time Inaxia is participating in Local Hack Day and I really love the atmosphere of this community. Really love to work with this amazing team. Not only that, we became good friends in less than a week. We share our stories along with our meals. I was an introvert before this hackathon, but now I think I can talk to different people around the world.

Our guild is in 13th position today:

All thanks to Inaxia Community and Local Hack Day for organizing such an amazing event where people connect with each other and become part of a family.

Honestly, I love our Inaxia community a lot and would love to be a part of it for years to come and make it big and impactful.

At last, I hope we can make Inaxia to top 10 this as the top teams are way ahead of us. No issues as this was our first time, but next year we will come with more energy and try to get every single point for our Guild as well as for ourselves.

Thank You Major League Hacking for organizing Local Hack Day