He will process your request, cook your desired food and present it back to you as a response. As said above, your server or application is the chef who is in the kitchen. This server will be processing your request and responding back to you. You make the requests while the waiter works as an API who is an intermediary and takes the request to the appropriate server.

How much time and energy is saved? This is exactly what an API does.Īs we visually depict the above analogy using an image, we can see that you are working as a user in the API world. What if the dish is not available? Well, the waiter knows beforehand you made the wrong request, so he will tell you then and there on the table that the food item is not available. This waiter is bilingual and speaks both of your ( chef and you) languages fluently. The waiter will come and take your requests, give them to the chef, and then in response bring back the food. A waiter is what can be seen as an API in the internet world. Also, how can we forget we live in this multilingual world? What if you do not understand the chef's language? We need a waiter here. There will be many customers present in the restaurant which will slow the process of the chef since now he will be listening to the orders instead of preparing them. What if the dish is not available? You will have to go to your seat again and decide something else.

There is no waiter present, so you need to see the menu lying on the table and then make a request to the kitchen where the chef will prepare the dish for you. Taking an analogy here, l et say you went to a restaurant. Let's break these terms and explore more about APIs. Talking in technical terms an API is a set of procedures, functions, and other points of access that an application, an operating system, a library, etc., makes available to programmers in order to allow it to interact with other software. API stands for Application Programming Interface.

Rest api tools like postman