Programming Foundations: APIs and Web Services
This LinkedInLearning activity focuses on web services and APIs. Web services allow systems to talk to each other over the internet which allows for language transparency. Language transparency helps with server side and client side code so you can use the programming language you want. There are many advantages when it comes to web services such as reusability and it promotes usability and deployability which allows them to be available on a global scale. When it comes to web services, security such as authentication and authorization is crucial. This is why web services require keys and API tokens. We then continue to RESTful APIs and how they differ from web services. REST stands for Representation State Transfer (which is what we also learned in web service!). These are basically guidelines for when you are creating APIs. Additionally, an alternative to RESTful APIs is SOAP. SOAP is Simple Object Access Protocol. It allows systems applications on different platforms to communicate to each other by using XML. SOAP allows for additional security. Finally, we finish with GraphQL. GraphQL is a query language. This is used for APIs. GraphQL is mainly used to load your data from server side to client side.