Mobius API Guide Intro

Introduction 

An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build or use such a connection or interface is called an API specification. A computer system that meets this standard is said to implement or expose an API. The term API may refer either to the specification or to the implementation. 

In contrast to a user interface, which connects a computer to a person, an application programming interface connects computers or pieces of software to each other. It is not intended to be used directly by a person (the end user) other than a computer programmer who is incorporating it into the software. An API is often made up of different parts which act as tools or services that are available to the programmer. A program or a programmer that uses one of these parts is said to call that portion of the API. The calls that make up the API are also known as subroutines, methods, requests, or endpoints. An API specification defines these calls, meaning that it explains how to use or implement them. 

One purpose of APIs is to hide the internal details of how a system works, exposing only those parts a programmer will find useful and keeping them consistent even if the internal details later change. An API may be custom-built for a particular pair of systems, or it may be a shared standard allowing interoperability among many systems. 

The term API is often used to refer to web APIs, which allow communication between computers that are joined by the internet. 

In building applications, an API simplifies programming by abstracting the underlying implementation and only exposing objects or actions the developer needs. While a graphical interface for an email client might provide a user with a button that performs all the steps for fetching and highlighting new emails, an API for file input/output might give the developer a function that copies a file from one location to another without requiring that the developer understand the file system operations occurring behind the scenes. 

REST 

Representational state transfer (REST) is a software architectural style that describes a uniform interface between physically separate components, often across the Internet in a Client-Server architecture. REST defines four interface constraints: 

• Identification of resources 

• Manipulation of resources 

• Self-descriptive messages and 

• hypermedia as the engine of application state 

Generally, REST describes a machine-to-machine interface. In web development REST allows content to be rendered when it's requested, often referred to as Dynamic Content. RESTful Dynamic content uses server-side rendering to generate a web site and send the content to the requesting web browser, which interprets the server's code and renders the page in the user's web browser 

REST has been employed throughout the software industry and is widely accepted as a set of guidelines for creating stateless, reliable web APIs. A web API that obeys the REST constraints is informally described as RESTful. In general, RESTful web APIs are loosely based on HTTP methods such as GET and POST. HTTP requests are used to access data or resources in the web application via URL-encoded parameters. Responses are generally formatted as either JSON or XML to transmit the data. 

"Web resources" were first defined on the World Wide Web as documents or files identified by their URLs. Today, the definition is much more generic and abstract and includes every thing, entity, or action connected to the Internet, local network or device. Every device on the Internet has a URI or Uniform Resource Identifier. In a RESTful Web service, requests made to a resource's URI elicit a response with a payload formatted in HTML, XML, JSON, or some other format. The most common protocol for these requests and responses is HTTP, which provides operations (HTTP methods) such as OPTIONS, GET, POST, PUT, PATCH and DELETE. By using a stateless protocol and standard operations, RESTful systems aim for fast performance, reliability, and the ability to grow by reusing components that can be managed and updated without affecting the system as a whole, even while it is running. 

Mobius API 

Mobius API is organized around REST. Our API has predictable resource-oriented URLs, accepts form-encoded request bodies, returns JSON-encoded responses, and uses standard HTTP response codes, authentication, and verbs. 

Note: Our API documentation is Swagger-built. in order to work with it directly from the site, set up the Management Platform Web Settings (CORS Enabled = true).