Web APIs

If you want to interact with a computer or system to retrieve information or perform a function, an API helps you communicate what you want to that system so it can understand and fulfill the request.

APIs let your product or service communicate with other products and services without having to know how they’re implemented.

These services provide features such as data storage, user administration, and push notifications via software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs). These APIs and SDKs allow developers to integrate the service into their products with just a few lines of code.

API Gateways

An API gateway is an API management tool that sits between a client and a collection of backend services.

An API gateway acts as a reverse proxy to accept all application programming interface (API) calls, aggregate the various services required to fulfill them, and return the appropriate result.

The API gateway intercepts all incoming requests and sends them through the API management system, which handles a variety of necessary functions

REST API

REST stands for representational state transfer and was created by computer scientist Roy Fielding.

The services within the microservices architecture use a common messaging framework, like RESTful APIs. They use RESTful APIs to communicate with each other without difficult data conversion transactions or additional integration layers. Using RESTful APIs allows, and even encourages, faster delivery of new features and updates.

API Usecase

Different services and technologies can communicate with each other through API services. Some API services are a collection of thousands of prebuilt APIs, while another type of API service is API gateways that help you manage traffic when you need to send and receive large amounts of information.

For example, we want to register the users who registered with our product to our CRM system, which we use for customer relationship management. For this, we need to send the "e-mail address" information of our users through the APIs of the Hubspot product we are using.

At this point, we should not forget that we need to comply with various data protection compliance requirements with regard to SCCs, DPAs and privacy notices.

from hubspot.crm.contacts import SimplePublicObjectInpu
from hubspot.crm.contacts.exceptions import ApiException
try:
    simple_public_object_input = SimplePublicObjectInput(
        properties={"email": "[e-mail]"}
    )
    api_response = api_client.crm.contacts.basic_api.create(
        simple_public_object_input=simple_public_object_input
    )
except ApiException as e:
    print("Exception when creating contact: %s\n" % e)t

We can use the services of Stripe, a payment system, to receive payments from users of our SaaS product. At this point, we need to save the newly registered user information to the Stripe database via an API in order to receive payment, apart from just writing it to our own database.

In order to achieve this, we can send this information to the Stripe database via the API with a piece of code like the example below.

import stripe
stripe.api_key = "sk_test_51GXRo6CjQJDRi0Nm1"
stripe.Account.create(
  type="custom",
  country="TR",
  email="[e-mail]",
  capabilities={
    "card_payments": {"requested": True},
    "transfers": {"requested": True},
  },
)

For the use of Stripe, we need to execute also SCCs and DPA for the data exchange between us and Stripe.