Introduction to APIs

APIs have been around almost since we started programming. Modern APIs started to be come as we know them now in the early 2000s, when companies such as Amazon started to provide access to their data through HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests. These companies changed the way we did business online. Developers could now get and post user information from services such as Salesforce and provide a full e-commerce experience on their application using APIs.

In 2004, with the introduction of social networks, we changed the way we were using the internet. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter started developing their own APIs. Similar to the e-commerce experience, developers could now get a user's profile information, events, and pictures from social networking applications.

A few years later, the new generation of smartphones came out. People started navigating the internet through their mobile phones and developers started developing applications...