APIs are quite prominent in the world we live in today. They are software that acts as an intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other. An API is a set of coded routines that receive requests from a source and sends responses to other programs.

The function of an API can be illustrated as following, imagine that at a restaurant, you are served with a menu of varied choices of food by a waitress, who receives your order of choice, then takes your order to the chef in the kitchen, who then prepares your order. The waitress then delivers your food once prepared by the chef. Similarly, an API receives a request, say from a website or an application input by a user and serves it to a database, the database contains all the necessary ingredients and information required, it then gives feedback which is taken by the API and sent back to the user or requester.

An example of this is a Bank API which would link a company’s accounting system with the Bank’s system so that it would be able to receive the company’s bank transactional information in real time or periodically so as to automate the manual process of bank reconciliation and data capturing.

,