Introduction to API

  API(Application Programming Interface) is Intermediate application which enables communication between two software applications. Let's understand it with MakeMyTrip application. For booking flights ticket and hotel room you might have used MakeMyTrip. Let's say you want to book room for accommodation in any hotel in particular city but problem is that how can you book room in any hotel through MakeMyTrip because it has not access to any hotel booking applications server. They are separate applications and how can any hotel application expose their server to any third party application. Here API comes into picture.

To solve this problem hotel applications expose API which enables communication between application server to third party applications to book ticket. So when you search ticket for hotel booking, MakeMyTrip send request to API of different hotel booking applications which communicates to application server to check if there is any room available. If room available then it'll return response to make my trip application to book the tickets.

API follows HTTP protocol to enables communication between client and server.