About API or Application Programming Interface
API or Application Programming Interface is an intermediate between the application that enables them to communicate with each other. Every time a user is accessing application like Facebook, Messenger, send an instant message or look for a weather forecast from the mobile phones, he or she is using an API.
How API Basically Works?
When a user accesses an application through a mobile phone, the application gets connected to the internet and sends its data to the server. After retrieving data, the server interprets it and perform the required actions. Then, send it back to the user's mobile phone. Afterward, the application will interpret it and display the information that a user wants in readable form. This is how exactly an API works.
For better understanding, consider the example given below:
When you go to some restaurant and seat on a table, you have a menu of choices from where you need to order. Here, a kitchen will work as a system, which will prepare your order. Now, how will you communicate with a kitchen? Here comes the requirement some intermediate i.e., waiter- or an API. He will tell your order to the kitchen and deliver your food back to your table. The waiter is an API or the messenger, which communicate your request or order to the server or kitchen.
Now, let us discuss one real-life example of an API. You must be familiar with the process of looking for a flight online. Here also you have a variety of options to choose from different cities, departure or return date and time. So, here we will assume that you are searching for a flight on an airline website. You have selected departure and return city date, cabin class, and all other attributes. Now, to book a flight, you need to interact with the airline's website in order to access their database and receives the desired results that match all searches like seat or dates available or what is the cost, etc.
What if you are using some online travel service like Yatra, MakeMyTrip that extract information from a number of airline databases? In that case, that particular travel service will communicate with airline's API. It is an interface that will provide you all information from the airline's database. The API will get the response of your request from the airline's and delivers it to that particular online travel service. After that, it will display the most updated and relevant information in front of you.
A Layer of Security Offered By an API
Always keep in mind that users phone's data is never totally revealed to the server. Similarly, the server is never completely exposed to user's phone. However, both of them will communicate via small packets of data and share only that information, which is required like ordering takeout. One needs to tell place of what he or she wants to eat and they will tell you what they want in return.
Moreover, API has become so important that they incorporate a large part of most of the business revenue. Google, eBay, Amazon, Expedia, and Salesforce.com: The Customer Success Platform To Grow Your Business are some of the big organizations that make money from the APIs also.
What is Application Orchestration Layer?
Services or application orchestration is simply the process of integrating two or more applications or services in combination to automate the process and synchronize all data in real-time. however, point-to-point integration can also be used as a path of least resistance. But, that point-to-point integration sometimes results in a complex knot of the applications with multiple dependencies (also referred as "spaghetti code"), which is really hard to handle, monitor and keep.
In addition, the Application Orchestration offers:
- It is used an approach to integration, which simply decouples the applications from each other.
- Abilities for transformation, reliability, message routing, and security
- It also provide a way to handle and monitor the integrations in a proper manner.
Application orchestration has become a most important part of software development. It is helpful in integrating multiple application quickly, manipulate data and indirect message flow is really important because the organization needs to do more with less. Moreover, application orchestration is a much better approach compared to point-to-point integration because it offers several services like security, transaction management, monitoring, tracking etc.
