APIs

Question 1

What is an API?

Answer 1

Application programming interface (API)

Defined set of methods which expose only the required objects or methods for a particular program to simplify programming or data access for a third party.

Web APIs to allow access to data in a data store

Question 2

Name 2 web APIs

Answer 2

1. SOAP

2. RESET

Question 3

What is SOAP?

Answer 3

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) allows communication using any protocol (HTTP, SMTP, TCP, UDP) via messages consisting of XML.

Benefits-
a. Can be used with any protocol, and XML allows easy extensibility.
Disadvantage-
b. Highly verbose protocol, slow parsing speed of XML so not scalable for large datasets

Question 4

What is REST?

Answer 4

Representational State Transfer (REST) allows requests via HTTP methods (GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE) to a resource URI to obtain an HTML, XML, or JSON payload.

Benefit-
1. Standardised and independent on platform or languages, highly readable, scalable for use with large datasets.