User:Queenfeline/IDIOTICON

Welcome to my personal dictionary.

API

API stands for Application Programming Interface. It's an interface for two computers to communicate in order to carry out tasks on the internet. The application can be any software that performs a specific task and the interface is a point where two applications communicate. One application acts as a client and the other acts as a server. A client asks for some resource, say for example a photo, and the server sends that photo to the client. The client here can be your mobile phone, desktop or laptop computer, or any device you use to surf the internet. And the server is a bigger computer that stores the data you want (a photo in our case).

APIs follow the HTTP protocol to communicate, which has a specific request and response structure.

Different methods exist to perform different tasks and numerous status codes are available that indicate whether the request is successful, declined, or in a pending state.