What is an API and how can it help your business.

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API It is an abbreviation for Application Programming Interfaces, which in Spanish means application programming interface.

It is a set of protocols used to integrate application software, thus allowing communication between two or more software applications through rules.

We can say that an API is a formal specification that establishes how a module of a software communicates or interacts with another to fulfill one or many functions. All depending on the applications that are going to use them, and on the permissions that the owner of the API gives to third-party developers.

From the outset, all you're going to see from an API are the results, how you open a mobile game and you can connect to your Facebook account to log in, how you can post the results of a game on Twitter or when that application sends you notifications to your cell phone.

The API can be private for a company to use, open only to partners, or public for any developer who wants to interact with them or create their own APIs to do so. Watch out! they can also be local APIs for applications that communicate within the same environment or device, or remote for when you need to access another different point.

What is an API for?

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One of the main functions of APIs is Facilitate them Work for developers.

For example: if you're creating an online store, you won't need to create a payment system or another from scratch to quote and ship. Since you can use the API of an existing payment service and in the other case use an API such as WeShip to be able to access quotes with the best packages in Mexico.

An API is also useful for when all you want is to use functions of a certain service to offer advantages to its users or attract users of that service to use your application.

Another classic example is that of third-party applications to connect to a service. For example, social networks such as Twitter or Reddit allow you to create applications other than the official ones to connect to them. These applications will need social media APIs in order to show you the information and the internal mechanisms that make them work.

Sometimes other services create free-form APIs to be used by third parties for specific tasks, and thus extend their use and popularity by creating new functions. For example, Google created one for Google Docs with which it allows the automated creation of invoices or sales reports to other services.

The use of APIs is the order of the day and they allow us to connect thousands of services to each other in order to take advantage of their resources and not rely solely on our own possibilities as a business.

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