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API
An application programming interface (API) is a way for
two or more computer programs to communicate with each other.
It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces
of software.[1] A document or standard that describes how to build
or use such a connection or interface is called an API
specification. A computer system that meets this standard is said
to implement or expose an API. The term API may refer either to
the specification or to the implementation.

In contrast to a user interface, which connects a computer to a

person, an application programming interface connects
computers or pieces of software to each other. It is not intended to
be used directly by a person (the end user) other than a computer
programmer who is incorporating it into the software. An API is
often made up of different parts which act as tools or services that
are available to the programmer. A program or a programmer that
uses one of these parts is said to call that portion of the API. The
calls that make up the API are also known as subroutines,
methods, requests, or endpoints. An API specification defines Screenshot of web API
these calls, meaning that it explains how to use or implement documentation written by NASA.
them.

One purpose of APIs is to hide the internal details of how a system works, exposing only those parts a
programmer will find useful and keeping them consistent even if the internal details later change. An
API may be custom-built for a particular pair of systems, or it may be a shared standard allowing
interoperability among many systems.

The term API is often used to refer to web APIs,[2] which allow communication between computers
that are joined by the internet. There are also APIs for programming languages, software libraries,
computer operating systems, and computer hardware. APIs originated in the 1940s, though the term
did not emerge until the 1960s and 1970s. Recent developments in APIs have led to the rise in
popularity of microservices, which are loosely coupled services accessed through public APIs.[3]

Contents
Purpose
History of the term
1940s and 1950s
1960s and 1970s
1990s
2000s
Usage
Libraries and frameworks
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Operating systems
Remote APIs
Web APIs
Design
Synchronous versus asynchronous
Security
Release policies
Public API implications
Documentation
Dispute over copyright protection for APIs
Examples
See also
References
Further reading
External links

Purpose
In building applications, an API simplifies programming by abstracting the underlying
implementation and only exposing objects or actions the developer needs. While a graphical interface
for an email client might provide a user with a button that performs all the steps for fetching and
highlighting new emails, an API for file input/output might give the developer a function that copies a
file from one location to another without requiring that the developer understand the file system
operations occurring behind the scenes.[4]

History of the term

The term API initially described an interface only for end-user-facing programs, known as application
programs. This origin is still reflected in the name "application programming interface." Today, the
term is broader, including also utility software and even hardware interfaces.[6]

1940s and 1950s

The idea of the API is much older than the term itself. British computer scientists Maurice Wilkes and
David Wheeler worked on a modular software library in the 1940s for EDSAC, an early computer. The
subroutines in this library were stored on punched paper tape organized in a filing cabinet. This
cabinet also contained what Wilkes and Wheeler called a "library catalog" of notes about each
subroutine and how to incorporate it into a program. Today, such a catalog would be called an API (or
an API specification or API documentation) because it instructs a programmer on how to use (or
"call") each subroutine that the programmer needs.[6]

Wilkes and Wheeler's 1951 book The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer
contains the first published API specification. Joshua Bloch considers that Wilkes and Wheeler
"latently invented" the API because it is more of a concept that is discovered than invented.[6]
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1960s and
1970s

Although the people who coined the term API

were implementing software on a Univac 1108,
the goal of their API was to make hardware
independent programs possible.[7]

The term "application program interface" (without an -ing suffix)

is first recorded in a paper called Data structures and techniques
A diagram from 1978 proposing the for remote computer graphics presented at an AFIPS conference
expansion of the idea of the API to in 1968.[8][6] The authors of this paper use the term to describe
become a general programming
the interaction of an application—a graphics program in this case
interface, beyond application
—with the rest of the computer system. A consistent application
programs alone.[5] interface (consisting of Fortran subroutine calls) was intended to
free the programmer from dealing with idiosyncrasies of the
graphics display device, and to provide hardware independence if
the computer or the display were replaced.[7]

The term was introduced to the field of databases by C. J. Date[9] in a 1974 paper called The
Relational and Network Approaches: Comparison of the Application Programming Interface.[10] An
API became a part of the ANSI/SPARC framework for database management systems. This
framework treated the application programming interface separately from other interfaces, such as
the query interface. Database professionals in the 1970s observed these different interfaces could be
combined; a sufficiently rich application interface could support the other interfaces as well.[5]

This observation led to APIs that supported all types of programming, not just application
programming.

1990s

By 1990, the API was defined simply as "a set of services available to a programmer for performing
certain tasks" by technologist Carl Malamud.[11]

The idea of the API was expanded again with the dawn of remote procedure calls and web APIs. As
computer networks became common in the 1970s and 1980s, programmers wanted to call libraries
located not only on their local computers but on computers located elsewhere. These remote
procedure calls were well supported by the Java language in particular. In the 1990s, with the spread
of the internet, standards like CORBA, COM, and DCOM competed to become the most common way
to expose API services.[12]

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2000s

Roy Fielding's dissertation Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software
Architectures at UC Irvine in 2000 outlined Representational state transfer (REST) and described the
idea of a "network-based Application Programming Interface" that Fielding contrasted with
traditional "library-based" APIs.[13] XML and JSON web APIs saw widespread commercial adoption
beginning in 2000 and continuing as of 2022. The web API is now the most common meaning of the
term API.[2]

The Semantic Web proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in 2001 included "semantic APIs" that recasts the
API as an open, distributed data interface rather than a software behavior interface.[14] Proprietary
interfaces and agents became more widespread than open ones, but the idea of the API as a data
interface took hold. Because web APIs are widely used to exchange data of all kinds online, API has
become a broad term describing much of the communication on the internet.[12] When used in this
way, the term API has overlap in meaning with the term communication protocol.

Usage

Libraries and frameworks

The interface to a software library is one type of API. The API describes and prescribes the "expected
behavior" (a specification) while the library is an "actual implementation" of this set of rules.

A single API can have multiple implementations (or none, being abstract) in the form of different
libraries that share the same programming interface.

The separation of the API from its implementation can allow programs written in one language to use
a library written in another. For example, because Scala and Java compile to compatible bytecode,
Scala developers can take advantage of any Java API.[15]

API use can vary depending on the type of programming language involved.
An API for a procedural
language such as Lua could consist primarily of basic routines to execute code, manipulate data or
handle errors while an API for an object-oriented language, such as Java, would provide a
specification of classes and its class methods.[16][17] Hyrum's law [18] states that "With a sufficient
number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable
behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody." Meanwhile, several studies show that
most applications that use an API tend to use a small part of the API.[19] API use actually varies
depending on the number of users, as well as on the popularity of the API.[20]

Language bindings are also APIs. By mapping the features and capabilities of one language to an
interface implemented in another language, a language binding allows a library or service written in
one language to be used when developing in another language.[21]

Tools such as SWIG and F2PY, a Fortran-to-Python interface generator, facilitate the creation of such
interfaces.[22]

An API can also be related to a software framework: a framework can be based on several libraries
implementing several APIs, but unlike the normal use of an API, the access to the behavior built into
the framework is mediated by extending its content with new classes plugged into the framework

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itself.

Moreover, the overall program flow of control can be out of the control of the caller and in the
framework's hands by inversion of control or a similar mechanism.[23][24]

Operating systems

An API can specify the interface between an application and the operating system.[25] POSIX, for
example, provides a set of common API specifications that aim to enable an application written for a
POSIX conformant operating system to be compiled for another POSIX conformant operating system.

Linux and Berkeley Software Distribution are examples of operating systems that implement the
POSIX APIs.[26]

Microsoft has shown a strong commitment to a backward-compatible API, particularly within its
Windows API (Win32) library, so older applications may run on newer versions of Windows using an
executable-specific setting called "Compatibility Mode".[27]

An API differs from an application binary interface (ABI) in that an API is source code based while an
ABI is binary based. For instance, POSIX provides APIs while the Linux Standard Base provides an
ABI.[28][29]

Remote APIs

Remote APIs allow developers to manipulate remote resources through protocols, specific standards
for communication that allow different technologies to work together, regardless of language or
platform.
For example, the Java Database Connectivity API allows developers to query many different
types of databases with the same set of functions, while the Java remote method invocation API uses
the Java Remote Method Protocol to allow invocation of functions that operate remotely but appear
local to the developer.[30][31]

Therefore, remote APIs are useful in maintaining the object abstraction in object-oriented
programming; a method call, executed locally on a proxy object, invokes the corresponding method
on the remote object, using the remoting protocol, and acquires the result to be used locally as a
return value.

A modification of the proxy object will also result in a corresponding modification of the remote
object.[32]

Web APIs

Web APIs are a service accessed from client devices (Mobile Phones, Laptop, etc.) to a web server
using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Client devices send a request in the form of an HTTP
request, and are met with a response message usually in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) or
Extensible Markup Language (XML) format. Developers typically use Web APIs to query a server for a
specific set of data from that server.

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An example might be a shipping company API that can be added to an eCommerce-focused website to
facilitate ordering shipping services and automatically include current shipping rates, without the site
developer having to enter the shipper's rate table into a web database. While "web API" historically
has been virtually synonymous with web service, the recent trend (so-called Web 2.0) has been
moving away from Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) based web services and service-oriented
architecture (SOA) towards more direct representational state transfer (REST) style web resources
and resource-oriented architecture (ROA).[33] Part of this trend is related to the Semantic Web
movement toward Resource Description Framework (RDF), a concept to promote web-based
ontology engineering technologies. Web APIs allow the combination of multiple APIs into new
applications known as mashups.[34]

In the social media space, web APIs have allowed web communities to facilitate sharing content and
data between communities and applications. In this way, content that is created in one place
dynamically can be posted and updated to multiple locations on the web.[35] For example, Twitter's
REST API allows developers to access core Twitter data and the Search API provides methods for
developers to interact with Twitter Search and trends data.[36]

Design
The design of an API has a significant impact on its usage.[4] First of all, the design of programming
interfaces represents an important part of software architecture, the organization of a complex piece
of software.[37] The principle of information hiding describes the role of programming interfaces as
enabling modular programming by hiding the implementation details of the modules so that users of
modules need not understand the complexities inside the modules.[38]
Aside from the previous
underlying principle, other metrics for measuring the usability of an API may include properties such
as functional efficiency, overall correctness, and learnability for novices.[39] One straightforward and
commonly adopted way of designing APIs is to follow Nielsen's heuristic evaluation guidelines. The
Factory method pattern is also typical in designing APIs due to their reusable nature.[40] Thus, the
design of an API attempts to provide only the tools a user would expect.[4]

Synchronous versus asynchronous

An application programming interface can be synchronous or asynchronous. A synchronous API call

is a design pattern where the call site is blocked while waiting for the called code to finish.[41] With a
asynchronous API call, however, the call site is not blocked while waiting for the called code to finish,
and instead the calling thread is notified when the reply arrives.

Security
API security is very critical when developing a public facing API. Common threats include SQL
injection, Denial-of-service attack (DoS), broken authentication, and exposing sensitive data.[42]
Without ensuring proper security practices bad actors can get access to information they should not
have or even gain privileges to make changes to your server. Some common security practices include
proper connection security using HTTPS, content security to mitigate data injection attacks, and
requiring an API key to use your service.[43] Many public facing API services require you to use an
assigned API key, and will refuse to serve data without sending the key with your request.[44]

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Release policies
APIs are one of the more common ways technology companies integrate. Those that provide and use
APIs are considered as being members of a business ecosystem.[45]

The main policies for releasing an API are:[46]

Private: The API is for internal company use only.

Partner: Only specific business partners can use the API. For example, vehicle for hire companies
such as Uber and Lyft allow approved third-party developers to directly order rides from within
their apps. This allows the companies to exercise quality control by curating which apps have
access to the API and provides them with an additional revenue stream.[47]
Public: The API is available for use by the public. For example, Microsoft makes the Windows API
public, and Apple releases its API Cocoa so that software can be written for their platforms. Not all
public APIs are generally accessible by everybody. For example, Internet service providers like
Cloudflare or Voxility, use RESTful APIs to allow customers and resellers access to their
infrastructure information, DDoS stats, network performance, or dashboard controls.[48] Access to
such APIs is granted either by "API tokens", or customer status validations.[49]

Public API implications

An important factor when an API becomes public is its "interface stability". Changes to the API—for
example adding new parameters to a function call—could break compatibility with the clients that
depend on that API.[50]

When parts of a publicly presented API are subject to change and thus not stable, such parts of a
particular API should be documented explicitly as "unstable". For example, in the Google Guava
library, the parts that are considered unstable, and that might change soon, are marked with the Java
annotation @Beta.[51]

A public API can sometimes declare parts of itself as deprecated or rescinded. This usually means that
part of the API should be considered a candidate for being removed, or modified in a backward
incompatible way. Therefore, these changes allow developers to transition away from parts of the API
that will be removed or not supported in the future.[52]

Client code may contain innovative or opportunistic usages that were not intended by the API
designers. In other words, for a library with a significant user base, when an element becomes part of
the public API, it may be used in diverse ways.[53]
On February 19, 2020, Akamai published their
annual "State of the Internet" report, showcasing the growing trend of cybercriminals targeting public
API platforms at financial services worldwide. From December 2017 through November 2019, Akamai
witnessed 85.42 billion credential violation attacks. About 20%, or 16.55 billion, were against
hostnames defined as API endpoints. Of these, 473.5 million have targeted financial services sector
organizations.[54]

Documentation
API documentation describes the services an API offers and how to use those services, aiming to cover
everything a client would need to know for practical purposes.

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Documentation is crucial for the development and maintenance of applications using the API.[55]
API
documentation is traditionally found in documentation files but can also be found in social media
such as blogs, forums, and Q&A websites.[56]

Traditional documentation files are often presented via a documentation system, such as Javadoc or
Pydoc, that has a consistent appearance and structure.
However, the types of content included in the
documentation differ from API to API.[57]

In the interest of clarity, API documentation may include a description of classes and methods in the
API as well as "typical usage scenarios, code snippets, design rationales, performance discussions, and
contracts", but implementation details of the API services themselves are usually omitted.

Restrictions and limitations on how the API can be used are also covered by the documentation. For
instance, documentation for an API function could note that its parameters cannot be null, or that the
function itself is not thread safe.[58] Because API documentation tends to be comprehensive, it is a
challenge for writers to keep the documentation updated and for users to read it carefully, potentially
yielding bugs.[50] Reference documentation for a REST API can be generated automatically from an
OpenAPI document, which is a machine-readable text file that uses a prescribed format and syntax
defined in the OpenAPI Specification. The OpenAPI document defines basic information such as the
API's name and description, as well as describing operations the API provides access to.[59]

API documentation can be enriched with metadata information like Java annotations. This metadata
can be used by the compiler, tools, and by the run-time environment to implement custom behaviors
or custom handling.[60]

It is possible to generate API documentation in a data-driven manner. By observing many programs

that use a given API, it is possible to infer the typical usages, as well the required contracts and
directives.[61] Then, templates can be used to generate natural language from the mined data.

Dispute over copyright protection for APIs

In 2010, Oracle Corporation sued Google for having distributed a new implementation of Java
embedded in the Android operating system.[62] Google had not acquired any permission to reproduce
the Java API, although permission had been given to the similar OpenJDK project. Google had
approached Oracle to negotiate a license for their API, but were turned down due to trust issues.
Despite the disagreement, Google chose to use Oracle's code anyway. Judge William Alsup ruled in
the Oracle v. Google case that APIs cannot be copyrighted in the U.S and that a victory for Oracle
would have widely expanded copyright protection to a "functional set of symbols" and allowed the
copyrighting of simple software commands:

To accept Oracle's claim would be to allow anyone to copyright one version of code to carry
out a system of commands and thereby bar all others from writing its different versions to
carry out all or part of the same commands.[63][64]

Alsup's ruling was overturned in 2014 on appeal to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit,
though the question of whether such use of APIs constitutes fair use was left unresolved.[65][66]

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In 2016, following a two-week trial, a jury determined that Google's reimplementation of the Java API
constituted fair use, but Oracle vowed to appeal the decision.[67] Oracle won on its appeal, with the
Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruling that Google's use of the APIs did not qualify for fair
use.[68] In 2019, Google appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States over both the
copyrightability and fair use rulings, and the Supreme Court granted review.[69] Due to the COVID-19
pandemic, the oral hearings in the case were delayed until October 2020.[70]

The case was decided by the Supreme Court in Google's favor with a ruling of 6–2. Justice Stephen
Breyer delivered the opinion of the court and at one point mentioned that "The declaring code is, if
copyrightable at all, further than are most computer programs from the core of copyright." This
means the code used in APIs are more similar to dictionaries than novels in terms of copyright
protection.[71]

Examples
ASPI for SCSI device interfacing
Cocoa and Carbon for the Macintosh
DirectX for Microsoft Windows
EHLLAPI
Java APIs
ODBC for Microsoft Windows
OpenAL cross-platform sound API
OpenCL cross-platform API for general-purpose computing for CPUs & GPUs
OpenGL cross-platform graphics API
OpenMP API that supports multi-platform shared memory multiprocessing programming in C,
C++, and Fortran on many architectures, including Unix and Microsoft Windows platforms.
Server Application Programming Interface (SAPI)
Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL)

See also
API testing List of 3D graphics APIs
API writer Microservices
Augmented web Name mangling
Calling convention Open API
Common Object Request Broker Architecture Open Service Interface Definitions
(CORBA) Parsing
Comparison of application virtual machines Plugin
Document Object Model (DOM) RAML (software)
Double-chance function Software development kit (SDK)
Foreign function interface Web API
Front and back ends Web content vendor
Interface (computing) XPCOM
Interface control document

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Further reading
Taina Bucher (16 November 2013). "Objects of Intense Feeling: The Case of the Twitter API" (htt
p://computationalculture.net/article/objects-of-intense-feeling-the-case-of-the-twitter-api).
Computational Culture (3). ISSN 2047-2390 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/2047-2390). Argues
that "APIs are far from neutral tools" and form a key part of contemporary programming,
understood as a fundamental part of culture.
What is an API? (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf) – in the U.S.
Supreme Court opinion, Google v. Oracle 2021, pp. 3–7 – "For each task, there is computer code;
API (also known as Application Program Interface) is the method for calling that 'computer code'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API 14/15
11/29/22, 2:00 PM API - Wikipedia

(instruction – like a recipe – rather than cooking instruction, this is machine instruction) to be carry
out"
Maury, Innovation and Change (http://ondrejka.net/history/2014/02/28/maury.html) – Cory
Ondrejka \ February 28, 2014 \ " ...proposed a public API to let computers talk to each other".
(Textise (https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=http://ondrejka.net/history/2014/02/28/ma
ury.html) URL)

External links
Forrester : IT industry : API Case : Google v. Oracle (https://go.forrester.com/what-it-means/ep218
-google-oracle-api-case/) – May 20, 2021 – content format: Audio with text – length 26:41

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