Short for Application Programming Interface, API is a software intermediary that allows applications, databases, libraries and systems to interact and communicate with one another. In other words, it works as a messenger or channel, delivering requests from one form to the other.
• Open APIs, or Public APIs, are publicly available without restriction
• Partner APIs refer to APIs in which specific rights or licenses are necessary to access them and are not available to the public
• Internal APIs, or Private APIs, can only be accessed by internal systems. Companies often use Internal APIs among in-house teams to improve products and services from their backend.
• Composite APIs are essentially a combination of different data and service APIs. Used to speed up execution processes and improve performance, Composite APIs refer to a sequence of tasks that run synchronously as a result of the execution and not at the request of a task.
