Best Practices for API-Driven Applications | by Devsena Mishra | Medium

In the last few years, Application programming interfaces (APIs) have been promoted from a development technique to a business model driver and a topic of c -level discussions.

Through APIs, today, an organization’s core assets can be reused, shared, and monetized, and this opens up new revenue streams for the companies too.

We see that almost all software applications expose APIs- somewhere within the system, from the internal classes, packages, and modules, to the external systems interface, and these days we treat APIs the way we treat software products.

So what is an API in simple terms and how is it different from an application from the user’s perspective?

Well, we can say the Applications are the ways through which we — the human users interact with the system. At the same time, APIs are the way or medium through which one application or service talks to other applications or services (It’s an interface for two or more applications to communicate with each other), and now since the business around APIs has evolved too, these APIs are being offered as the product to users, particularly to Developer community, that’s why we see every central platform out there from social media platforms to music apps to map providers to weather services, etc. all offer their APIs as the product. This trend fuels the API economy too.

In a nutshell, API offers a better way to encapsulate and share information and enable transaction processing between elements in the solution stack. For developers, the APIs make it easier to access the capabilities or data of another application or system, rather than having to build everything from scratch, this enables developers to leverage the functionality of existing systems, and build new applications quickly and efficiently.

Now let’s see what Some of the Common Best Practices or considerations related to API driven Applications or API driven Development are:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmzo1y-Djio