The digital landscape of business has provided a lot of exciting innovative and new ways of experiencing commerce. With more and more cloud-based services coming on line, the horizon for what is possible for business owners keeps expanding. Thanks to the plethora of SaaS (Software as a Service) platforms, cloud services, and software development tools, businesses have more and more options and variety than ever before.

For any business that is looking to grow in the modern digital area, the issue of data is paramount. The importance of data is nothing new, as data has always been a business's most valuable resource. Data can help give powerful insight into customer interactions, business health, and analytics that are vital for growth and expansion. One of the most valuable things that data can do, is help to make a business run in a way that improves customer experience.

One of the greatest challenges that businesses face is collecting all of this data from disparate sources. For any business, there are always going to be a variety of different applications that it relies on in order to give a particular service. In order to do this, there has to be some way of communicating between applications and allowing data to travel throughout a business framework.

In order for the various applications to share data within a business, you need a tool called an API. API stands for Application Program Interface, and it can be thought of as a door that connects a series of apps to the same ‘hallway’. These doors allow for data from various applications to flow into a centralized location and seamlessly interact with each other.

This can be cloud-based apps, SaaS tools, or entire systems that can interact and connect to each other via an API. When it comes to tools in the digital world that are considered vital for success, an API is perhaps one of the most important. APIs also offer a necessary amount of automation, helping to take care of repetitive processes that can free up your data engineers and teams. APIs not only are necessary for data transferal but powerful to help teams leverage their time wisely to build up better and stronger customer experiences, rather than have their hands full of tedious tasks.

There are two parts to an API that are important to understand, the API itself and then API integrations. While an API is like the doorway that opens up to the data produced at a source, API integration represents the hallway that all of the data from various sources funnel into. API integrations can either be built by software developers who create these custom ‘hallways’, or they can be accomplished via off-the-shelf solutions.

The main challenge with using a software developer to handle your API integrations is the complexity of developing a custom script for every application and data source. While this is something that can lend itself to a greater amount of customization, it may not be the best option for some companies looking for an easier, or more affordable solution.

Three Major Types of APIs

There are two fundamental parts of an API, and those are the server and the client. APIs set up a set of rules that govern the information transferred between the server and the client who is accessing it.

Understanding how these two interact and what your business specifically needs out of this interaction will help give you insight into what kind of API framework will work best for your particular needs.

When it comes to looking for the right kind of API, there are three general frameworks to choose from, REST, SOAP, and RPC.

REST

REST stands for Representational State Transfer, and it specializes in sending data from a server to a client. This style follows HTTP protocol, and the responses are formatted typically in JSON for the sake of compatibility.

SOAP

SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol, and this kind of API focuses mostly on secure internal data transfers. This kind of API has been around for the last three decades, and it helps to define messages and their contents.

RPC

RPC stands for Remote Procedure Call APIs, and this kind of framework uses both JSON and XML protocols. This framework focuses on the processes and actions of a framework, more than the transferring of data.

Conclusion

Using APIs has become something that is ubiquitous in the landscape of the modern digital world. With more and more reliance on cloud-based services, understanding the importance and need for APIs is imperative for businesses to not only be competitive but achieve their goals. Finding out what kind of API framework and integration works best for you and your company is a necessary part of achieving success in the digital age.