![]() ![]() The versatility of APIs makes them powerful tools for developers to extend the capabilities of their applications. This is how APIs allow software systems to expand their services and functionality, and integrate with other platforms in a more thorough and meaningful way. In other words, APIs aren’t just for displaying data to a user in an interface––they can also be used to make changes to it in the application where it is stored. In addition to receiving data, APIs can also handle the full gamut of “CRUD” (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations between two applications. The universal nature of API interactions can enable countless scenarios, from an iPhone user checking the local temperature via the AccuWeather API to an Uber driver navigating to their next pickup location via the Google Maps API. This is what allows applications to share data regardless of their individual programming languages or internal specifications. Provided the request is valid, the receiving system will respond with the requested data in a machine-readable format, commonly XML or JSON. In a typical API use case, one software program will ask for a specific set of data from another using an HTTP GET request. This is the purpose of a webhook––instead of having to repeatedly request the data, the receiving application can sit back and get what it needs without having to send repeated requests to another system.Īn important feature of APIs is that they provide two-way communication between different software programs via a request-response cycle, most commonly using the HTTP protocol. Instead of Slack continuously asking Twitter for new posts meeting these criteria, it makes much more sense for Twitter to send a notification to Slack only when this event takes place. Say for instance you want to receive Slack notifications when tweets that mention a certain account and contain a specific hashtag are published. ![]() With web services becoming increasingly interconnected, webhooks are seeing more action as a lightweight solution for enabling real-time notifications and data updates without the need to develop a full-scale API. Webhooks are sometimes referred to as “reverse APIs,” because communication is initiated by the application sending the data rather than the one receiving it. Instead of one application making a request to another to receive a response, a webhook is a service that allows one program to send data to another as soon as a particular event takes place. A webhook can be thought of as a type of API that is driven by events rather than requests. ![]()
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