API - Wikipedia Jump to content Main menu Main menu move to sidebar hide Navigation Main page Contents Current events Random article About Wikipedia Contact us Contribute Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file Special pages Search Search Appearance Donate Create account Log in Personal tools Donate Create account Log in Contents move to sidebar hide (Top) 1 Purpose 2 History of the term 3 Types Toggle Types subsection 3.1 Libraries and frameworks 3.2 Operating systems 3.3 Remote APIs 3.4 Web APIs 4 Design 5 Release policies Toggle Release policies subsection 5.1 Public API implications 6 API documentation 7 Dispute over copyright protection for APIs 8 Examples 9 See also 10 References 11 Further reading 12 External links Toggle the table of contents API 72 languages العربية Asturianu Azərbaycanca Boarisch Беларуская Български বাংলা Bosanski Català کوردی Čeština Dansk Deutsch Ελληνικά Esperanto Español Eesti Euskara فارسی Suomi Français Nordfriisk Gaeilge Galego Hausa עברית हिन्दी Hrvatski Magyar Հայերեն Bahasa Indonesia Igbo Ido Italiano 日本語 ქართული Қазақша 한국어 Lietuvių Latviešu മലയാളം Монгол Bahasa Melayu Nederlands Norsk nynorsk Norsk bokmål Polski Piemontèis Português Runa Simi Română Русский Srpskohrvatski / српскохрватски Simple English Slovenčina Slovenščina Shqip Српски / srpski Svenska Kiswahili தமிழ் ไทย Tagalog Türkçe Українська اردو Oʻzbekcha / ўзбекча Tiếng Việt 吴语 მარგალური 粵語 中文 Edit links Article Talk English Read View source View history Tools Tools move to sidebar hide Actions Read View source View history General What links here Related changes Upload file Permanent link Page information Cite this page Get shortened URL Switch to legacy parser Print/export Download as PDF Printable version In other projects Wikimedia Commons MediaWiki Wikidata item Appearance move to sidebar hide From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Api) Connection between computers or programs For other uses, see API (disambiguation). "Api.php" redirects here. For the Wikipedia API, see Special:ApiHelp. An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software.[1][2] A document or standard that describes how to build such a connection or interface is called an API specification. A computer system that meets this standard is said to implement or expose an API. The term API may refer either to the specification or to the implementation. In contrast to a user interface, which connects a computer to a person, an application programming interface connects computers or pieces of software to each other. It is not intended to be used directly by a person (the end user) other than a computer programmer[2] who is incorporating it into software. An API is often made up of different parts which act as tools or services that are available to the programmer. A program or a programmer that uses one of these parts is said to call that portion of the API. The calls that make up the API are also known as subroutines, methods, requests, or endpoints. An API specification defines these calls, meaning that it explains how to use or implement them. One of the main purpose of APIs is to hide the internal details of how a system works, exposing only those parts a programmer will find useful and keeping them consistent even if the internal details later change. An API may be custom-built for a particular pair of systems, or it may be a shared standard allowing interoperability among many systems. The term API is often used to refer to web APIs,[3] which allow communication between computers that are joined by the internet. There are also APIs for programming languages, software libraries, computer operating systems, and computer hardware. APIs originated in the 1940s, though the term did not emerge until the 1960s and 70s. Purpose An API opens a software system to interactions from the outside. It allows two software systems to communicate across a boundary — an interface — using mutually agreed-upon signals.[4] In other words, an API connects software entities together. Unlike a user interface, an API is typically not visible to users. It is an "under the hood" portion of a software system, used for machine-to-machine communication.[5] A well-designed API exposes only objects or actions needed by software or software developers. It hides details that have no use. This abstraction simplifies programming.[6] Metaphorically, APIs connect software like interlocking blocks. Building software using APIs has been compared to using building-block toys, such as Lego bricks. Software services or software libraries are analogous to the bricks; they may be joined together via their APIs, composing a new software product.[7] The process of joining is called integration.[4] As an example, consider a weather sensor that offers an API. When a certain message is transmitted to the sensor, it will detect the current weather conditions and reply with a weather report. The message that activates the sensor is an API call, and the weather report is an API response.[8] A weather forecasting app might integrate with a number of weather sensor APIs, gathering weather data from throughout a geographical area. An API is often compared to a contract. It represents an agreement between parties: a service provider who offers the API and the software developers who rely upon it. If the API remains stable, or if it changes only in predictable ways, developers' confidence in the API will increase. This may increase their use of the API.[9] History of the term A diagram from 1978 proposing the expansion of the idea of the API to become a general programming interface, beyond application programs alone[10] The term API initially described an interface only for end-user-facing programs, known as application programs. This origin is still reflected in the name "application programming interface." Today, the term is broader, including also utility software and even hardware interfaces.[11] The idea of the API is much older than the term itself. British computer scientists Maurice Wilkes and David Wheeler worked on a modular software library in the 1940s for EDSAC, an early computer. The subroutines in this library were stored on punched paper tape organized in a filing cabinet. This cabinet also contained what Wilkes and Wheeler called a "library catalog" of notes about each subroutine and how to incorporate it into a program. Today, such a catalog would be called an API (or an API specification or API documentation) because it instructs a programmer on how to use (or "call") each subroutine that the programmer needs.[11] Wilkes and Wheeler's book The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer contains the first published API specification. Joshua Bloch considers that Wilkes and Wheeler "latently invented" the API, because it is more of a concept that is discovered than invented.[11] Although the people who coined the term API were implementing software on a Univac 1108, the goal of their API was to make hardware independent programs possible.[12] The term "application program interface" (without an -ing suffix) is first recorded in a paper called Data structures and techniques for remote computer graphics presented at an AFIPS conference in 1968.[13][11] The authors of this paper use the term to describe the interaction of an application—a graphics program in this case—with the rest of the computer system. A consistent application interface (consisting of Fortran subroutine calls) was intended to free the programmer from dealing with idiosyncrasies of the graphics display device, and to provide hardware independence if the computer or the display were replaced.[12] The term was introduced to the field of databases by C. J. Date[14] in a 1974 paper called The Relational and Network Approaches: Comparison of the Application Programming Interface.[15] An API became a part of the ANSI/SPARC framework for database management systems. This framework treated the application programming interface separately from other interfaces, such as the query interface. Database professionals in the 1970s observed these different interfaces could be combined; a sufficiently rich application interface could support the other interfaces as well.[10] This observation led to APIs that supported all types of programming, not just application programming. By 1990, the API was defined simply as "a set of services available to a programmer for performing certain tasks" by technologist Carl Malamud.[16] Screenshot of Web API documentation written by NASA The idea of the API was expanded again with the dawn of remote procedure calls and web APIs. As computer networks became common in the 1970s and 80s, programmers wanted to call libraries located not only on their local computers, but on computers located elsewhere. These remote procedure calls were well supported by the Java language in particular. In the 1990s, with the spread of the internet, standards like CORBA, COM, and DCOM competed to become the most common way to expose API services.[17] Roy Fielding's dissertation Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures at UC Irvine in 2000 outlined Representational state transfer (REST) and described the idea of a "network-based Application Programming Interface" that Fielding contrasted with traditional "library-based" APIs.[18] XML and JSON web APIs saw widespread commercial adoption beginning in 2000 and continuing as of 2021. The web API is now the most common meaning of the term API.[3] The Semantic Web proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in 2001 included "semantic APIs" that recast the API as an open, distributed data interface rather than a software behavior interface.[19] Proprietary interfaces and agents became more widespread than open ones, but the idea of the API as a data interface took hold. Because web APIs are widely used to exchange data of all kinds online, API has become a broad term describing much of the communication on the internet.[17] When used in this way, the term API has overlap in meaning with the term communication protocol. Types Libraries and frameworks The interface to a software library is one type of API. The API describes and prescribes the "expected behavior" (a specification) while the library is an "actual implementation" of this set of rules. A single API can have multiple implementations (or none, being abstract) in the form of different libraries that share the same programming interface. The separation of the API from its implementation can allow programs written in one language to use a library written in another. For example, because Scala and Java compile to compatible bytecode, Scala developers can take advantage of any Java API.[20] API use can vary depending on the type of programming language involved. An API for a procedural language such as Lua could consist primarily of basic routines to execute code, manipulate data or handle errors while an API for an object-oriented language, such as Java, would provide a specification of classes and its class methods.[21][22] Hyrum's law states that "With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody."[23] Meanwhile, several studies show that most applications that use an API tend to use a small part of the API.[24] Language bindings are also APIs. By mapping the features and capabilities of one language to an interface implemented in another language, a language binding allows a library or service written in …