Applications often need to talk to one another. When you go to apply for a job, sometimes you will see an option that allows you to import your profile from LinkedIn. What’s happening here is the site you’re using is talking to LinkedIn, and requesting some information. If you've ever seen a Google map inside of another website or app such as Yelp--you're accessing remote data from a 3rd party source.
This data can be very useful. You can pick and choose what parts of an application you want to use without trawling through an entire codebase. You can add a lot of interesting functionality into simple apps.
We'll discuss the answers to the following questions along the way:
- What is an API?
- How can APIs be used?
- How do you find the API endpoint?
- How do you send a request to an API?
In the next couple of lessons, we'll talk about leveraging remote data in our applications.