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Sign into your accountWhat Are APIs and Why Do They Matter?
June 08 2015
At the RESO Show n' Tell last week, 19 companies showcased their latest developments in a single afternoon. A prevailing theme touched on by SF MLS, Homes.com, Retsly, and Onboard was that of the power of APIs.
Since the API seems to be the future of innovation, I thought it would be a good time to review exactly what we're talking about with this three-lettered marvel.
What the heck is an API?
API stands for Application Programming Interface. You can think of an interface as a path where two components exchange information.
Programming and application are terms we're probably more familiar with. If you ever looked at your computer and quoted Salt-N-Pepa ("Don't know how you do the voodoo that you do"), that voodoo is programming. A developer has figured out how to tell the computer to react a certain way through source code. I know. We're magic.
And if you pull out your iPhone or Android, you'll see a number of applications. On my own phone, I have a weather app, a city biking app, and Runtastic. So applications are cool tools we use almost every single day.
So what we're talking about when we say API is a really sophisticated way to exchange information--in our case, local information --so we developers can do our voodoo and create amazing applications for either the world to enjoy or for your business to solve difficult problems. In all honesty, it's a little more complicated than that – involving specifications, functionality, formatting, input and output – but for our purposes, we'll keep it simple.