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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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The process of joining is called
integration
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
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.
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
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
10
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.
10
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.
10
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.
11
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.
12
10
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.
11
The term was introduced to the field of
databases
by
C. J. Date
13
in a 1974 paper called
The
Relational
and
Network
Approaches: Comparison of the Application Programming Interface
14
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.
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
15
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.
16
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.
17
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.
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.
18
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.
16
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.
19
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
20
21
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."
22
Meanwhile, several studies show that most applications that use an API tend to use a small part of the API.
23
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 one language to be used when developing in another language.
24
Tools such as
SWIG
and F2PY, a
Fortran
-to-
Python
interface generator, facilitate the creation of such interfaces.
25
An API can also be related to a
software framework
: a framework can be based on several libraries implementing several APIs, but unlike the normal use of an API, the access to the behavior built into the framework is mediated by extending its content with new classes plugged into the framework itself.
Moreover, the overall program flow of control can be out of the control of the caller and in the framework's hands by
inversion of control
or a similar mechanism.
26
27
Operating systems
An API can specify the interface between an application and the
operating system
28
POSIX
, for example, specifies a set of common APIs that aim to enable an application written for a POSIX conformant operating system to be
compiled
for another POSIX conformant operating system.
Linux
and
Berkeley Software Distribution
are examples of operating systems that implement the POSIX APIs.
29
Microsoft has shown a strong commitment to a backward-compatible API, particularly within its
Windows API
(Win32) library, so older applications may run on newer versions of Windows using an executable-specific setting called "Compatibility Mode".
30
How much Microsoft developers' access to the company's operating systems' internal APIs is an advantage is unclear. Richard A. Shaffer of
Technologic Computer Letter
in 1987 compared the situation to a baseball game in which "Microsoft owns all the bats and the field",
31
and large vendors like
Lotus Development
and
Ashton-Tate
reportedly received information about
MS-DOS 5.0
that smaller software developers did not.
32
Ed Esber
of Ashton-Tate said in a 1987 interview, however, that
Bill Gates
told him that his developers sometimes had to rewrite software based on early APIs. Gates noted in the interview that Microsoft's
Apple Macintosh
applications were more successful than those for MS-DOS, because his company did not have to also devote resources to
Mac OS
33
An API differs from an
application binary interface
(ABI) in that an API is source code based while an ABI is
binary
based. For instance,
POSIX
provides APIs while the
Linux Standard Base
provides an ABI.
34
35
Remote APIs
Remote APIs allow developers to manipulate remote resources through
protocols
, specific standards for communication that allow different technologies to work together, regardless of language or platform.
For example, the Java Database Connectivity API allows developers to query many different types of
databases
with the same set of functions, while the
Java remote method invocation
API uses the Java Remote Method Protocol to allow
invocation
of functions that operate remotely, but appear local to the developer.
36
37
Therefore, remote APIs are useful in maintaining the object abstraction in
object-oriented programming
; a
method call
, executed locally on a
proxy
object, invokes the corresponding method on the remote object, using the remoting protocol, and acquires the result to be used locally as a return value.
A modification of the proxy object will also result in a corresponding modification of the remote object.
38
Web APIs
Main article:
Web API
Web APIs are the defined interfaces through which interactions happen between an enterprise and applications that use its assets, which also is a
Service Level Agreement
(SLA) to specify the functional provider and expose the service path or URL for its API users. An API approach is an architectural approach that revolves around providing a program interface to a set of services to different applications serving different types of consumers.
39
When used in the context of
web development
, an API is typically defined as a set of specifications, such as
Hypertext Transfer Protocol
(HTTP) request messages, along with a definition of the structure of response messages, usually in an Extensible Markup Language (
XML
) or JavaScript Object Notation (
JSON
) format. An example might be a shipping company API that can be added to an eCommerce-focused website to facilitate ordering shipping services and automatically include current shipping rates, without the site developer having to enter the shipper's rate table into a web database. While "web API" historically has been virtually synonymous with
web service
, the recent
when?
trend (so-called
Web 2.0
) has been moving away from Simple Object Access Protocol (
SOAP
) based web services and
service-oriented architecture
(SOA) towards more direct
representational state transfer
(REST) style
web resources
and
resource-oriented architecture
(ROA).
40
Part of this trend is related to the
Semantic Web
movement toward
Resource Description Framework
(RDF), a concept to promote web-based
ontology engineering
technologies. Web APIs allow the combination of multiple APIs into new applications known as
mashups
41
In the social media space, web APIs have allowed web communities to facilitate sharing content and data between communities and applications. In this way, content that is created in one place dynamically can be posted and updated to multiple locations on the web.
42
For example, Twitter's REST API allows developers to access core Twitter data and the Search API provides methods for developers to interact with Twitter Search and trends data.
43
Design
The design of an API has significant impact on its usage.
The principle of
information hiding
describes the role of programming interfaces as enabling
modular programming
by hiding the implementation details of the modules so that users of modules need not understand the complexities inside the modules.
44
Thus, the design of an API attempts to provide only the tools a user would expect.
The design of programming interfaces represents an important part of
software architecture
, the organization of a complex piece of software.
45
Release policies
APIs are one of the more common ways technology companies integrate. Those that provide and use APIs are considered as being members of a business ecosystem.
46
The main policies for releasing an API are:
47
Private
: The API is for internal company use only.
Partner
: Only specific business partners can use the API. For example,
vehicle for hire
companies such as
Uber
and
Lyft
allow approved third-party developers to directly order rides from within their apps. This allows the companies to exercise quality control by curating which apps have access to the API, and provides them with an additional revenue stream.
48
Public
: The API is available for use by the public. For example,
Microsoft
makes the
Windows API
public, and
Apple
releases its API
Cocoa
, so that software can be written for their
platforms
. Not all public APIs are generally accessible by everybody. For example, Internet service providers like Cloudflare or Voxility, use
RESTful
APIs to allow customers and resellers access to their infrastructure information, DDoS stats, network performance or dashboard controls.
49
Access to such APIs is granted either by “API tokens”, or customer status validations.
50
Public API implications
An important factor when an API becomes public is its "interface stability". Changes to the API—for example adding new parameters to a function call—could break compatibility with the clients that depend on that API.
51
When parts of a publicly presented API are subject to change and thus not stable, such parts of a particular API should be documented explicitly as "unstable". For example, in the
Google Guava
library, the parts that are considered unstable, and that might change soon, are marked with the
Java annotation
@Beta
52
A public API can sometimes declare parts of itself as
deprecated
or rescinded. This usually means that part of the API should be considered a candidate for being removed, or modified in a backward incompatible way. Therefore, these changes allow developers to transition away from parts of the API that will be removed or not supported in the future.
53
Client code may contain innovative or opportunistic usages that were not intended by the API designers. In other words, for a library with a significant user base, when an element becomes part of the public API, it may be used in diverse ways.
54
On February 19, 2020,
Akamai
published their annual “State of the Internet” report, showcasing the growing trend of cybercriminals targeting public API platforms at financial services worldwide. From December 2017 through November 2019, Akamai witnessed 85.42 billion credential violation attacks. About 20%, or 16.55 billion, were against hostnames defined as API endpoints. Of these, 473.5 million have targeted financial services sector organizations.
55
API documentation
API documentation describes what services an API offers and how to use those services, aiming to cover everything a client would need to know for practical purposes.
Documentation is crucial for the development and maintenance of applications using the API.
56
API documentation is traditionally found in documentation files but can also be found in social media such as blogs, forums, and Q&A websites.
57
Traditional documentation files are often presented via a documentation system, such as Javadoc or Pydoc, that has a consistent appearance and structure. However, the types of content included in the documentation differs from API to API.
58
In the interest of clarity, API documentation may include a description of classes and methods in the API as well as typical usage scenarios, code snippets, design rationales, performance discussions, and contracts, but implementation details of the API services themselves are usually omitted. It can take a number of forms, including instructional documents, tutorials, and reference works. It'll also include a variety of information types, including guides and functionalities.
Restrictions and limitations on how the API can be used are also covered by the documentation. For instance, documentation for an API function could note that its parameters cannot be null, that the function itself is not
thread safe
59
Because API documentation tends to be comprehensive, it is a challenge for writers to keep the documentation updated and for users to read it carefully, potentially yielding bugs.
51
API documentation can be enriched with metadata information like
Java annotations
. This metadata can be used by the compiler, tools, and by the
run-time
environment to implement custom behaviors or custom handling.
60
It is possible to generate API documentation in a data-driven manner. By observing many programs that use a given API, it is possible to infer the typical usages, as well the required contracts and directives.
61
Then, templates can be used to generate natural language from the mined data.
Dispute over copyright protection for APIs
Main article:
Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc.
In 2010, Oracle Corporation sued Google for having distributed a new implementation of Java embedded in the Android operating system.
62
Google had not acquired any permission to reproduce the Java API, although permission had been given to the similar OpenJDK project. Judge
William Alsup
ruled in the
Oracle v. Google
case that APIs cannot be
copyrighted
in the U.S. and that a victory for Oracle would have widely expanded copyright protection to a "functional set of symbols" and allowed the copyrighting of simple software commands:
To accept Oracle's claim would be to allow anyone to copyright one version of code to carry out a system of commands and thereby bar all others from writing its different versions to carry out all or part of the same commands.
63
64
Alsup's ruling was overturned in 2014 on appeal to the
Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
, though the question of whether such use of APIs constitutes
fair use
was left unresolved.
65
66
In 2016, following a two-week trial, a jury determined that Google's reimplementation of the Java API constituted
fair use
, but Oracle vowed to appeal the decision.
67
Oracle won on its appeal, with the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruling that Google's use of the APIs did not qualify for fair use.
68
In 2019, Google appealed to the
Supreme Court of the United States
over both the copyrightability and fair use rulings, and the Supreme Court granted review.
69
Due to the
COVID-19 pandemic
, the oral hearings in the case were delayed until October 2020.
70
The case was decided by the Supreme Court in Google's favor.
71
Examples
Main category:
Application programming interfaces
ASPI
for
SCSI
device interfacing
Cocoa
and
Carbon
for the
Macintosh
DirectX
for
Microsoft Windows
EHLLAPI
Java APIs
ODBC
for
Microsoft Windows
OpenAL
cross-platform sound API
OpenCL
cross-platform API for general-purpose computing for CPUs & GPUs
OpenGL
cross-platform graphics API
OpenMP
API that supports multi-platform shared memory multiprocessing programming in C, C++, and Fortran on many architectures, including Unix and Microsoft Windows platforms.
Server application programming interface
(SAPI)
Simple DirectMedia Layer
(SDL)
See also
API testing
API writer
Application binary interface
Augmented web
Calling convention
Common Object Request Broker Architecture
(CORBA)
Comparison of application virtual machines
Document Object Model
(DOM)
Foreign function interface
Front and back ends
Interface (computing)
Interface control document
List of 3D graphics APIs
Microservices
Name mangling
Open API
Open Service Interface Definitions
Parsing
Plugin
RAML (software)
Software development kit
(SDK)
Web API
Web content vendor
XPCOM
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Further reading
Bucher, Taina (16 November 2013).
"Objects of Intense Feeling: The Case of the Twitter API"
Computational Culture
(3).
ISSN
2047-2390
Argues that "APIs are far from neutral tools" and form a key part of contemporary programming, understood as a fundamental part of culture.
Ondrejka, Cory (February 28, 2014). "
Maury, Innovation and Change
". (
Textise
URL.) " ...proposed a public API to let computers talk to each other".
U.S. Supreme Court
. "
What is an API?
". In the
court opinion
Google v. Oracle 2021
, pp. 3–7: "For each task, there is
computer code
; API (also known as Application Program Interface) is the method for calling that 'computer code' (instruction – like a
recipe
– rather than cooking instruction, this is
machine
instruction) to be carry out".
External links
Forrester : IT industry : API Case : Google v. Oracle
– May 20, 2021 – content format: Audio with text – length 26:41
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