What is Web API

Web API is a network application programming interface. Containing a wide range of functions, network applications can implement storage services, messaging services, computing services and other capabilities through API interfaces. These capabilities can be used to develop powerful web applications.

Today's web computing platforms include a wide range of capabilities, most of which are accessible through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). From the simple social bookmarking service del.icio.us to the much more complex Amazon S3' fully virtualized storage platform, it's amazing to think about what you can do with these web APIs.

The web platform is classified into 6 basic facilities and briefly outlines some related products. The clue is that these products provide APIs, which means they can themselves be integrated with other services.

Storage service:

Storage service focuses on abstraction and virtualized storage. The leader in this field is Amazon S3, which has been discussed in depth in my article in web 2.0 journal. For developers, S3 provides extremely streamlined and abstract APIs such as hash tables, allowing you to easily access information. Another interesting service is openemy, which provides an API similar to the file system interface, but adds the ability to label files. Earlier this year, TechCrunch dissected a number of other online storage services. But so far we have not seen the legendary disruptive storage services GDrive (from Google) and LiveDrive (from Microsoft). They will most likely provide APIs.

Message service:

Message service is conceptually similar to middleware in the traditional sense. Due to technical and commercial complexities, they have not yet been developed on a large scale. The web-based communication service that will be visible in the short term is Amazon Simple Queue Service. This service facilitates secure and scalable queue-based communication between any application.

Computing service:

Currently there is no general web computing service black box that can be accessed through API, but there are many technologies pointing in this direction. One is the alexavertical search platform, which will be mentioned more in the search service section below, and the second is grid computing, such as sungrid, datasynapse's gridserver or platform's symphony. Encapsulating arbitrary computing tasks in an API is a very challenging task, and it may take many years before such a service becomes widely popular.

Information service: Information service provides a large amount of specific information. Including geographic data like the Google Maps API, product data like Amazon E-Commerce, Amazon historical Pricing Services and the newly released Yahoo! answer's API login. What these services have in common is that they all provide simple APIs to access massive amounts of data, potentially leading to unpredictable cross-applications between siled information.

Search service:

Because of the foundation and dominance of search in the web field, search service forms a key part of the new web infrastructure. Google search API is an earlier and now typical search abstraction mechanism. Another example is the Alexa Search Platform, whose design has led to a series of vertical search engines that challenge Google's status. What is quite interesting is that from a technical point of view, the Alexa Search Platform is more of a computing service, but it is limited to the search field. This means the possibility of other services, such as sorting services or data transformation services.

web2.0 services:

The last category is broadly called web2.0 services. The name is not necessarily relevant, but it includes things like del.icio.us, flickr, basecamp. John Musser compiled some very influential APIs in Programmableweb. These specific services will become consumers of the other services mentioned above in the future, but currently their value lies in the fact that they provide clear, specific, and simple APIs to view and change the information everyone has. Even though they look more like molecules than atoms, they are such fundamental services in today's web that it makes sense to me to think of them as building blocks.

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