What is Python API?

API stands for an application programming interface. It is a protocol that is an interface that establishes communication between the software components. It is a set of programming instructions and standards through which you can access a web application.

Why APIs are important?

The basic web pages are created by HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It is difficult to rip out the data from HTML. APIs make is simpler.

When there is a need to create API.

• When your data is very large and it needs to be downloaded through FTP.
• When another user needs to access your data to display on the website or for on the application.
• When data is changing very frequently.
• When you need to perform certain operations on data expect to retrieve, contributing, updating, and deleting data.

The terminology used in APIs:

• HTTP (Hypertext transfer protocol): It is a fundamental property through which communication on the web is possible. It has a number of methods which tells in which direction our data is moving. The two most common methods are GET and POST. Get pull the data from the server. POST pushes the new data request to the server. Mainly we process our data in these two methods only.
• URL (Uniform Resource Locator): URL is the address of web pages on the web. It consists of a protocol, domain, and path. The protocol here is (Http), domain(name of the website), and path(page of the website for example about page, the home page).
• JSON(JavaScript Object Notation): It is a text-based data storage format. It is mainly designed to make the reading easy for both humans and machines. JSON is most commonly used to return data from the API. The second data format is used is XML to return the data from the API.
• REST(Representational State Transfer): It is used to implement APIs. APIs designed with some or all of these principles in mind is called REST APIs.