What is Web API? Basics | Beginners Dotnet Bees

Hey Everyone,



Thank you for tuning in and you are listening to Prashant where I will talk about dotnet and related Technologies.



Today I have taken up a very interesting topic called WEB API.



We will try to understand what is web API? And why it’s been brought in to the web development?



As per Wikipedia API is the Application Programming Interface for either a web server or web browser.

Before we jump into what is web API let’s try to understand how the web applications used to work before web API. 



Initial days of web application development both the presentation layer and server-side code has to have in the same project.



Such tight coupling of server-side and client-side code did not allow developers to work separately. Until and unless the work of BE did not complete, the work of FE could not be started.



This tight coupling also restricted the use of multiple tech stacks into the product.



Deployment of such applications became pain since it was not possible to deploy presentation and server code into a different machine. 

They had to have the same machine. 

Which resulted in less utilization of server resources and increased the cost of deployment.



The major problem with such an approach was after a certain time adding new and removing Any feature from the product became very difficult. 

It was hard to understand the system for new developers. All such delays and costs resulted in a huge revenue decline for software companies.



Then the concept of WEB API evolved. It promised to bring clear separation into the product code.

If someone wants to develop server-side code in dotnet core then for the presentations layer the code can be developed in any language.

It provided flexibility in choosing the tech stack and also

 It can be reused in the different presentation layer. This means once the product functionality is written it can be consumed by any presentation layer.



WEB API also solved the problem of deployment where both presentation and server code could be deployed in the different cloud servers.

Web API also allowed developers of both UI and BE to work independently.



Now next question comes how WEB API able to solve this problem?



Server-side code will expose endpoint which could be consumed by the presentation layer using HTTP or SOAP



Endpoints are nothing but a URI using which any interface can consume data or post data to the server.



WEB API brought a drastic change in the way web applications used to look before. 



I hope I have covered most of the things in the basics of WEB API.



Stay tuned will bring some more interesting topics for you.



Till then stay happy and keep sharing the knowledge.


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