What is an API?
An API stands for – Application Programming Interface. Technically we can define an API as a group of programming logic that might depend on database queries to perform a specific task.
In a nutshell, An API is a software interface to communicate with users over a network. Developers build new APIs to extend or implement a new business requirement by managing requests and responses.
How does an API work?
Every day people have to use software anyhow. Even a tech haters person can not avoid using software like an ATM booth. How does the average person feel about the workflow of software? Let’s consider an ATM booth to understand the workflow to process a successful transaction from start to end.
ATM booth starts processing a transaction by asking the users to input a card pin. After successful verification, proceed to the next steps – cash withdrawal, pin update, etc. How do the actions complete just by clicking the button on the screen? The ATM booth does not preserve any customer information but only the money. A central database of the bank stores all of its customer’s information. Now, it is a question of how an ATM booth communicates with a central database to perform user actions. API works as a wire between the ATM booth and the database. API authenticates a request by verifying the card PIN and allows execution of other operations like cash withdrawal, etc.
How API development takes an unusual amount of time?
An idea starts from the ground to help people with physical or virtual products. What makes an idea live in the virtual world is software. A bundle of stack makes software complementary to convert an idea to a product. Not everything is more straightforward than we can say. They might be co-related but not less cumbersome to define. In software development, we don’t see backstage scenarios. Comparatively, it is easier to create a visual appearance of how users use the software. But it is too difficult to define all business requirements in one glance.
The most time-consuming process in software development is developing APIs. We already know about the API and how it works. The API development time depends on the depth of the idea. Developers use different server-side programming to develop APIs based on requirements. Business requirements may change over time which requires customizing the existing logic. That’s another headache for a developer when writing code with thinking about the future extension.
There are some reasons why API development takes extra time and does it affect software development directly.
1. Unclear business requirements. 2. Insufficient knowledge to co-relate features based on dependency. 3. Lack of code modularity. 4. Inefficient database query.
Conclusion
API development plays a crucial role in software development. It takes a sufficient amount of time and investment to start or extend a business. Future business expansion or customization of existing features creates more headaches. In this article, we tried to find some factors that developers and business owners should figure out beforehand.