Application Programming Interface

Think of it as a set of tools designed for software developers. API makes your life easier by giving you access to data and providing you with an abstraction of the implementation.

Interface

-> Interface, through which the user interacts. The developer knows what' s happening behind the scenes.
-> When the user clicks, it does something! APIs works actually as interfaces that are abstracting details for him.

Flashlight API

-> Let’s say when the user clicks, it throws the flashlight. So, it' s worth noting the code probably also uses the Flashlight API
-> This API abstracts away the details of how to send flashlight to the user when he interacts with the button
-> You just need to call on/off method of a Flashlight API to make it work!

UI V/S API

-> User Interface (UI) is made for the user interaction.
-> Application Programming Interface (API) is made for the programmers to use. They save you from needing to create everything yourself.

SOAP APIs V/S REST APIs

-> Soap/Web based API calls are sent from web apps using XML between systems through HTTP
-> Rest is a style of architecture that provides standards on the web between systems
-> Well, SOAP stands for Service Object Access Protocol and REST stands for Representational State Transfer
-> Soap/Web API can only work with XML but Rest API can work with plain text, HTML, XML, JSON, etc.