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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.
Representation of different software components for performing a hypothetical holiday reservation in UML. An interface description language or interface definition language (IDL) is a generic term for a language that lets a program or object written in one language communicate with another program written in an unknown language.
An example of a popular web API is the Astronomy Picture of the Day API operated by the American space agency NASA. It is a server-side API used to retrieve photographs of space or other images of interest to astronomers, and metadata about the images. According to the API documentation, [15] the API has one endpoint:
There are two previous major description languages: WSDL 2.0 (Web Services Description Language) and WADL (Web Application Description Language). Neither is widely adopted in the industry for describing RESTful APIs, citing poor human readability of both and WADL being actually unable to fully describe a RESTful API. [2]
In programming and software design, a binding is an application programming interface (API) that provides glue code specifically made to allow a programming language to use a foreign library or operating system service (one that is not native to that language).
An open API (often referred to as a public API) is a publicly available application programming interface that provides developers with programmatic access to a (possibly proprietary) software application or web service. [1] Open APIs are APIs that are published on the internet and are free to access by consumers. [2]
In contrast, an application programming interface (API) defines this access in source code, which is a relatively high-level, hardware-independent, often human-readable format. A common aspect of an ABI is the calling convention, which determines how data is provided as input to, or read as output from, computational routines.
The OpenAPI Specification, previously known as the Swagger Specification, is a specification for a machine-readable interface definition language for describing, producing, consuming and visualizing web services. [1]