If you are planning to start working over php’s web api’s to develop and support your new mobile application backend, then this blog tutorial will be beneficial for you to go through, why it is significant to create web api oriented mobile applications.
An application programming interface (API) is a source code connected with backend database based on user requests aiming to be used by any software application or website UI to correspond with each other to generate precise output. An API may consist collection of data structures, object classes and variables. In simple terms, web api is a set of functions or methods which integrated within an application and a best way to improve the scalability of app functionality. An api oriented web application is a web application that actually executes most of its functionality with the help of api calls and returns the specific result only if the app user has entered the correct combination of information. Another key feature of api is that it doesn’t recognize api calls by sessions as api’s are always stateless, since api calls are often generate by backend code and hard to implement session handling, since there are usually no cookies involved in that. This is actually good limitation which forces every developer to create an api not based on the current user’s state but rather on app functionality, which makes it easy to test, since the present state of a user does not need to be recreated.
According to a survey, people are spending their more time on web apps rather than on the internet that clearly shows it would inevitably leads to extra usage of mobile applications. One of the main benefits of using application programming interface (api) based app is that it help audience to use it from any handheld device whether it be a smart phone, a tablet, a browser or even on desktop app. But it is important to create an api in such a way to respond all these device simultaneously and need to built a centralized application which can take input parameters from user and execute its relevant output. So in this way, we can easily take advantage to track out various sources of data from different people.
API’s provides different services to fetch resources from external resources & applications and with multi platform support interface, it is used access data resources from application which has been coded in various programming languages like java, android and more. Using web api technology is more preferably in use over simple object access protocol (SOAP) technology as it consumes less bandwidth making it more efficient in terms of internet usage. Web api’s can also be used by cloud users to expose & organize the accessibility of web services and it’s logical part permits the user to connect to and interact with cloud services interactively in a distributed environment. API’s works in a series of small modules to complete their transactions that signifies the underlying part of transaction. In order to perform well, an ideal web service must hold on to the below mention fundamental architectural rules:
- Resources in API should be recognizable with a single url with the help of underlying network protocol methods and should be possibly manipulate a resource.
- There should be clear explanation between client and server, UI and data gathering concerns are at the client side domain & taking work load management, data handling concerns and security related issues are on the part of server side responsibility.
- All client-server tasks should be stateless, and any state management that is required should take place on the client, not the server.
- All resources should allow caching unless or until explicitly indicating that caching is not possible.
- Web API should allow for an architecture that is composed of multiple layers of servers.
- Most of the time, a server will send back static representations of resources in the form of xml or json. However, when necessary, servers can send executable part of code to the client.
After reading this blog post, you will come to know about implementation of php webservices api and it can be better if you learn core php concepts more thoroughly which will effective to improve your skills in creating mobile app webservices.
