In today’s era, where absolutely every step is pulled by technology, whether you want or not, you have to devote some of your life to technology. This is even more pronounced if you are in the IT field or just starting with it. Here we will outline only one part of the technology, which is the API. An API is a set of functions or procedures used by computer programs to access operating system services, software libraries, or other systems.

What is API?

Application Program Interface stands for API, that is, an API acts as a contract between two pieces of software to determine how to communicate and what stoplight to use. When you see a Twitter profile or a Google Maps widget embedded in another website, that has been achieved via API. Home delivery services use an API to determine your position, another API to reserve food in a restaurant, and finally, another one so that the driver can get to your location and deliver your food.

An API can be considered as an intermediary between a computer engineer and the application they create. The intermediary accepts messages, sends requests and returns information to the sender of the message. A user could ask the intermediary for certain information, such as a list of customer names. Likewise, the user could send information to the broker when creating a new subscription for a client.

Choose the Best

With so many APIs, how do you choose the one that is best based on the payment needs of your business? When you are working on your own integration, especially when you are a beginner, you need to know how easy it can be to work with an API. It must be understandable and updated on a regular basis. Also, should have API client library. Having this available will allow you to accelerate the integration process by facilitating the ability to copy and paste code samples into known programming languages such as Ruby, Python, PHP and Java.

It needs to be easy to use. The structure of the API must be consistent, logical and simple to follow when you are doing your integration. There must be clear error messages when something is not right. The availability is very important. To begin, check the time in which the API is operational. Is it highly available and active when you need it?

After these, you can deal with ‘lighter’ things. Ideally, the support should be facilitated by a team of specialists who have the necessary knowledge to solve problems easily and quickly, both by phone and by email. The API should allow you to change or modify credentials, such as passwords, to restrict the access, if necessary, of certain people. In addition, it is especially important that there is an encryption of payments that keeps the data safe.

These are just basic things about the API. It is certain that you will need all these basics, and more certain is that technology changes every day and makes progress at incredible speed, so you have to keep up with all the developments.