Recently, we have seen many APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) on the Internet that provide data for almost every need, like foreign exchange, location, news, sports scores, bank, music, and more. It provides more convenience to businesses by purchasing APIs that provide this service, bypassing many costs such as obtaining, maintaining, and protecting data. Businesses want API integration to use this data in their projects. So what is API integration?
API integration, which is frequently preferred today for data transfer, provides businesses with the data they need. But before we delve deeper into API integration and its benefits, let’s review the concept of API and API types.
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What is an API?
API actually stands for Application Programming Interface. APIs are defined as programming interfaces that connect platforms or programs, make requests, and pass data between them. The API defines a set of protocols and rules that govern the interaction between different platforms.
Programming interfaces guarantee communication between different types of code by defining certain behaviors they will have among themselves. The goal is to facilitate integration between different solutions to use out-of-the-box features in other applications.
To give an example of how APIs work, consider, for example, a waiter taking care of you in a restaurant. You are the customer and sit at the table with a menu in hand to order. Another factor in the process is the restaurant’s kitchen, the provider that will fulfill your order. You need a link to deliver your order to the kitchen and then a link to bring their food back to your table. The chef can’t be that link because the chef is cooking in the kitchen. You need something to connect the customer ordering the food and the chef preparing it. The connection you need here is the waiter or the API for our topic. The waiter takes your order, sends it to the kitchen, and tells the kitchen what to do. It then transmits the response from the kitchen to you.
What are the API Types?
There are many types of APIs. For example, Java APIs or interfaces that allow objects within classes to talk to each other in the Java programming language are one of them. Besides program-oriented APIs, there are Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Remote Procedure Call (RPC), and perhaps most popularly known, Representational State Transfer (REST) web services.
What is the API Integration?
API integrations are mechanisms that automatically exchange data between software applications. These integrations are used in many scenarios we encounter in our daily lives. For example, the automatic syncing of data from our photo galleries on our smartphones to a cloud is an example of API integration. In this way, our photos are securely backed up and accessible on different devices.
Businesses can also effectively automate many system functions using API integrations. The automatic data update and synchronization features offered by API integrations increase data consistency, reduce data errors and make business processes more efficient.
Benefits of the API Integration
In this section, we will cover the 7 most popular benefits of API integration for businesses and developers.
Improved Customer Experience
API integration enables businesses to deliver an effective, seamless, and personalized customer experience to their customers. It helps easily improve the customer experience. For example, a business that integrates an IP geolocation API implementation can obtain users’ location information. Thus, this business can provide a personalized experience to its users by offering localized content or campaigns.
Streamlined Transactions
API integration eliminates the need for manual data acquisition or repetitive operations. So, API integration allows applications to seamlessly exchange data between different systems. For example, by integrating a news API into a business’s application, they can quickly obtain news data from hundreds of news sources. Then, businesses can easily present thousands of news from different sources to their users through their applications.
Reduction of Errors
API integrations optimize business processes by reducing system or human errors that may occur in workflows. API integrations, in particular, help employees avoid the task of copying and pasting data that could lead to errors. For example, an e-commerce platform provides API integration with a payment gateway, allowing customer payments to be transferred directly to the system. In this way, financial data is automatically synchronized and problems caused by incorrect data entries are minimized.
Enhanced Collaboration
API integration makes it easy for businesses to store, share, and collaborate on data between departments or business partners. For example, it enables a business to easily save data for its users in business processes by adding a file upload API to its application and quickly sharing it with different departments.
Competitive Advantage
With API integration, businesses provide a competitive advantage by enabling them to offer unique, innovative, and differentiated products or services to their users. Thus, businesses can increase user experience and generate organic traffic to their apps. For example, a business can offer multiple payment options to its users by integrating FinTech APIs into its applications. It offers innovative payment solutions such as mobile wallets or blockchain-based transactions. Moreover, it can attract tech-savvy customers and outperform its competitors.
Advanced Security
The API integration can improve security and compliance measures by centralizing data access and validation. With the increasing importance of data, businesses can easily increase data security by validating data. For this, businesses can set up a secure and standardized API infrastructure that provides data privacy, authentication, and authorization. For example, businesses using a number validation API can obtain information about whether their users’ number information is valid. Then they can quickly send confidential information to their users whose phone number is valid.
Wide Audience
API integration enables businesses to expand internationally and appeal to people in multiple geographies. Businesses can easily realize their growth strategies with API integration. For example, businesses that integrate a forex API that supports more than 150 official currencies into their applications offer a wide range of forex services to their users. This is the biggest feature of trading platforms that serve more than one country today.
What are the Top APIs for Free Integration?
In this section, we will introduce the most popular free REST APIs that businesses can use in their applications. Businesses can quickly gain the benefits of API integrations by quickly integrating these APIs into their applications.
Fixer API
Fixer API is a very comprehensive currency API that many businesses integrate into their applications today. This API provides businesses with multiple services in 170 official currencies. Such as live currency conversion, historical unit data, and time series. Fixer API provides the data it provides to its users with high accuracy. It obtains this data from official financial institutions such as the European Central Bank.
This API has an unlimited free plan for 100 requests per month. In addition, their paid plans start at $14.99 per month.
The ipstack API
The ipstack API is an IP geolocation API used by national companies such as Microsoft and Samsung. It has more than 2 million unique locations and more than 200,000 city information. It contains unique fields such as the currency of the location corresponding to the IP address, timezone, and continent information. Finally, this API responds in both XML and JSON formats.
This API offers its users a free plan for 100 requests per month. The first paid plan is $10.99 per month.
The mediastack API
The mediastack API is the most popular free news API today, supporting over 7,500 news sources. This API also provides multiple languages in more than 50 countries. By presenting real-time and historical news data, it offers a very large data pool to businesses. Additionally, developers can easily integrate this API into all programming languages.
This API offers free usage of up to 500 requests per month. Their paid plans start at $24.99 per month.
Conclusion
To sum up, API integrations are very popular methods that businesses use to exchange data today. These integrations also have incredible benefits for businesses in streamlined transactions, error reduction, competitive advantage, and more.
See our unique free API products, easily integrate them into your application and make a difference.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How does the REST API (Application Programming Interface) Work?
A: The REST API is based on the client-server model. The client makes a request to the REST API and the server processes the request and returns the result to the client. This request to the REST API needs to be redirected to a specific resource using the HTTP method. The most commonly used HTTP methods are:
- GET: Reading a resource.
- POST: Creating or updating a resource.
- PUT: Fully updating a resource.
- PATCH: Partial updating of a resource.
- DELETE: Deleting a resource.
Q: What are the Some Common API Integration Platforms?
API integration involves connecting multiple applications to facilitate data transfer and streamline business processes. The API integration platform plays a great important role in simplifying and managing the API integration process.
Here are some popular API integration platforms:
- Zapier
- MuleSoft
- Dell Boomi
- Jitterbit
- SnapLogic
- Tray.io
Q: Does APILayer Provide Sample Integration Code for Each API Product?
A: Yes, it does. Each API product listed under APILayer has comprehensive and up-to-date API documentation. This API documentation contains very informative content about the API. In addition to this information, it also provides users with sample integration handles of this API to multiple programming languages.
Q: What are Some Benefits of API Integrations?
A: API integrations power processes by allowing seamless communication and exchange of data between multiple software applications. Some of the benefits are as follows:
- Data Sharing and Synchronization
- Automation and Efficiency
- Cooperation and Integration
- Personalized Customer Experience
Q: What are the Benefits of API Integration Tools to Businesses?
A: There are many advantages that API integration tools provide to businesses over custom API integrations. Firstly, these tools offer their users the opportunity to make a fast integration. Then, they increase the integration experience with the rich platforms they support. Finally, these tools can also appeal to non-technical users thanks to their user-friendly interfaces.
