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What Web APIs Are, and What They Can Do for You

Posted In WordPress - By Techtiplib on Friday, September 11th, 2015 With No Comments »

When you’re running your own business, whether you service customers locally, nationwide, across the entire continent, or the whole world, you need a functional, high-performance website. Your website can serve many purposes, all of which help to earn you the business that you deserve. From educating your customers about your services, to funnelling new prospects into your e-mail or telephone list, to setting up appointments for clients, your site can be a crucial driving force that takes you from being profitable, to being completely inundated with clients.

Web APIs

One factor that’s unique about the web is its ability to provide services to customers right from the comfort of their home. Software on your site can provide unique customer experiences that set you apart from your competitors, but you can’t just drive to the market and pick this up. Your unique software ideas and needs will need to be developed by special API programmers that work directly with you to help you achieve your vision.

A server-side web API is a programmatic interface to a defined request-response message system, typically expressed in JSON or XML, which is exposed via the web—most commonly by means of an HTTP-based web server. Mashups are web applications which combine the use of multiple such web APIs. Webhooks are server-side web APIs that take as input a URI that is designed to be used like a remote named pipe or a type of callback such that the server acts as a client to dereference the provided URI and trigger an event on another server which handles this event thus providing a type of peer-to-peer IPC.

What Is An API?

API stands for application programming interface, and it’s a set of protocols that can be uniquely developed for your needs to deliver a particular feature to your clients. When a piece of software is designed for you, it’s going to need cooperation from existing streams of data in your system. For example, if you wanted to create software that would automatically alert your customers when there was a problem with their order, the software would need the application programming interface in order to read the data on your servers, and then have access to your customer database so that a message could be sent to them.

What Can an API Developer Help You Do? Trialling

Imagine you’re a customer who wants to check on the status of an order. Would you prefer to call the company, wait on hold, be transferred multiple times, and then speak to a company representative who can check the status of your order, or would you prefer to log on to their website and check for yourself in a matter of just a few seconds? Better yet, wouldn’t you love it if the status of your order was automatically delivered to you after you checked a box on that company’s website? These kinds of tasks can be automated for your clients if the software exists to help you. As mentioned above, there’s not a way for you to pick up a pre-made piece of software and tell it what you want it to do. In most cases, your unique ideas will require your website to be updated to support these kinds of features, and this is why a web developer is needed to help you with your API development. These tools and features can make your customer or client experience more enjoyable while also removing frustration and redundancy within your company.

Author Bio:

Simon Hopes is a renowned author and social media enthusiasm. He suggests that is an example of what an API development company in Berkshire can help you accomplish, regardless of your unique needs or the size of your customer reach.

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