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API description languages are sometimes called interface description languages (IDLs). The structured description might be used to generate documentation for human programmers ; such documentation may be easier to read than free-form documentation, since all documentation generated by the same tool follows the same formatting conventions.
API use can vary depending on the type of programming language involved. An API for a procedural language such as Lua could consist primarily of basic routines to execute code, manipulate data or handle errors while an API for an object-oriented language, such as Java, would provide a specification of classes and its class methods.
A Web API is a development in Web services where emphasis has been moving to simpler representational state transfer (REST) based communications. [2] Restful APIs do not require XML-based Web service protocols (SOAP and WSDL) to support their interfaces.
An example of a popular web API is the Astronomy Picture of the Day API operated by the American space agency NASA. It is a server-side API used to retrieve photographs of space or other images of interest to astronomers, and metadata about the images. According to the API documentation, [15] the API has one endpoint:
A user-agent makes an HTTP request to a REST API through an entry point URL. All subsequent requests the user-agent may make are discovered inside the response to each request. The media types used for these representations, and the link relations they may contain, are part of the API. The client transitions through application states by ...
A REST-based protocol, OData builds on HTTP, AtomPub, and JSON using URIs to address and access data feed resources. It enables information to be accessed from a variety of sources including (but not limited to) relational databases, file systems, content management systems, and traditional Web sites.
It provides all the information necessary to describe APIs on the level 2 of the Richardson Maturity Model. Although designed with RESTful APIs in mind, RAML is not capable of describing APIs that obey all constraints of REST (it cannot describe an API obeying HATEOAS, in particular). It encourages reuse, enables discovery and pattern-sharing ...
The RESTful Service Description Language (RSDL) is a machine- and human-readable XML description of HTTP-based web applications (typically REST web services). [1]The language (defined by Michael Pasternak during his work on oVirt RESTful API) allows documenting the model of the resource(s) provided by a service, the relationships between them, and operations and the parameters that must be ...