Web APIs

Web APIs are interfaces that define a series of specifications about the protocol used, message encoding, and available endpoints with their expected input and output values. There are two main paradigms for this kind of API—REST and SOAP:

• REST APIs have the following characteristics:
  • They treat data as a resource.
  • Each resource is identified by a URL.
  • The type of operation is specified by the HTTP method.
• SOAP protocols have the following characteristics:
  • They are defined by the W3C standard.
  • XML is the only encoding used for messages.
  • They use a series of XML schema to verify the data.