To any of you who are looking at launching your own business online you may have ran into a roadblock when it comes to finding a great API to support what it is that you wish to carry out for your customers. This is something which many people are blinded by at first, but the reality is that not only are APIs very simple to understand, you can find a wide range of options when it comes to API management solutions to help you to manage and maintain the API. Now, if you are unaware of what this is, and you are only aware of what you are trying to do with your product, here is a few examples of the application programming interface, which in a nutshell is simply a piece of software that allows two apps to talk to each other.
Booking
When you go to a website such as Booking you can instantly check hotels, rental cars and flights in an instant, as well as dates and availability. In order for Booking to be able to do this it will use an API which allows all of those apps to converse and to deliver the result to you. The same thing happens with a website such as Skyscanner.
Live Sports Scores
There is a wide variety of sites where you can go to in order to check sports scores, but how d they manage to get all of those scores in one place, in real time? This is done through the use of an API and it is a perfect example of multiple APIs working together as one in order to bring you scores from sporting events all over the world.
Cryptocurrency Prices
When you search online for crypto prices you need them right at the moment that they change, this is essential for investors to buy and sell. In order to gather so much in formation in realtime the API is put to use whereby they can deliver exactly the info that we need, in a heartbeat.
Pokemon Go
The game that set the world alight was Pokemon Go, where players would charge off into the streets trying to find Pokemon in their local areas. This depended heavily on APIs because of the fact that the game had to use maps and weather to show off where each character could be found. This in fact was a perfect example of just how powerful an API could be, and how it could interact with the entertainment world to deliver something of great value, and of course of great fun.
Essentially any website or application which you use that also depends on information coming from elsewhere, it is highly likely that they will depend on an API in order to make this a reality. As you can see from these basic examples, the use of an API is ubiquitous and they really are not anywhere near as complex or complicated as they sound.
