Why Back-End or API Development? How do APIs Work?

The UI/UX is the part of the front-end which attracts the users or customers.?

But how things will actually happen internally???

How will the customers interact with the product??

How can they share their ideas and feelings?

How can they actually access the features?

How do they actually reach us with their feedback?

These are some of the questions which come to our mind and which are obvious. Lets understand first what is back-end development and API development.

Lets understand what is back-end development with an example?

We have seen movies and know the basics about how a movie is made. Every movie has a story, a director, an actor and actress, dialogues, songs etc. We only saw the front-end part but not able to see the back-end part., right?

There are a lot of efforts made by the back-end team. First of all a script is written, a set prepared for the movie, and a lot of effort is made by costume designers and makeup artists for a single shoot. A lot of effort was made by the director for a 30 second shoot many times. A lot of efforts were made for shooting.

But we are able to see only front-end efforts only in a movie. There is a big management team working for a movie.

Similarly we can relate this example in our product development as well. Our customers are only able to see the front-end part but they don’t know how many people or teams are working on the back-end things.

Apart from UI/UX team the following teams works in back-end as

1. APIs development team for Back-end Programming/Coding
2. QA Team for Testing the Product
3. DBA(Database Administrator) Team for Handling Database
4. DevOps Team for Maintaining the Servers and Deployments

Each and every module or feature required coding or programming to interact with the front-end part. To reach one place to another we need some kind of transport bus, car or bike. In a similar way we need APIs to interact with front-end modules or features. We can easily understand how APIs interact with front-end with the following diagram as

Suppose there is a product requirement to develop a product as

• User can register and login
• A functionality to add products or catalog from back-end
• User can able to search or filter their desired products
• End-to-end add to cart to thank you page a shopping experience
• Different communications like email, sms or push notifications wherever its required
• User can able to track their order in his account
• Return and refund handling
• A CMS management platform for static pages
• A CANP(Communication Alerting and Notification Platform)

So, based on the above requirements we could need the below APIs as

1. Login API
2. Register API
3. Forgot Password API
4. Product Listing API
5. Product Searching and Filtering API
6. Product Details Page(PDP) API
7. Add to Cart API
8. Recommended Products API
9. CMS API for Static Contents
10. Shipping Address Get API
11. Shipping Address Add API
12. Payments APIs
13. Refund and Return APIs
14. CANP(Communication Alerting and Notification APIs)
15. Thank you page API
16. Home Page APIs

Back-end programming team is responsible for developing all these APIs with the UI team development team.

Now lets understand what APIs are and how it works?

APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, are a set of protocols, routines, and tools used to build software applications. An API acts as an intermediary between different software applications, allowing them to communicate with each other and share data.

At a high level, APIs work by exposing a set of endpoints that other software applications can call to retrieve or manipulate data. These endpoints can be accessed using a specific URL, and they usually require some sort of authentication or authorization to ensure that only authorized users can access them.

When an API endpoint is called, the API server receives the request, processes it, and returns a response in a specified format, such as JSON or XML. The response usually contains the requested data or an error message if something goes wrong.

APIs can be used for a wide range of purposes, including integrating different software applications, accessing data from external sources, and building custom software applications that leverage existing functionality. They are a powerful tool for software developers, as they allow them to leverage existing functionality and data sources without having to build everything from scratch.

We can easily understand by the help of the following diagram how an API works as

We can understand the APIs as a central access point for all the product interfaces like desktop, mobile site, tablet, android app or ios app. We can think how it would be difficult without the APIs. We have to write the same code multiple times for each product interface. So, APIs make our life easier in product development.

There could be different UI/UX for according to the product interfaces for example our UI could be different for our desktop site and different for our mobile apps but the APIs would be the same. There is no doubt that API development plays an important role in our product development.

I hope you like it and I would request to you please like it, share it and comment on it because this is the only way to appreciate me so that I could serve you a better content always.

Conclusion

UI/UX is the part of the front-end in product development. API is a part of back-end development which is one of the most important parts of a product development. There could be various features in any product and each and every feature needs an API to interact with that feature. Whenever any user or client accesses any feature an API request goes to the API server. The API server makes a request to the database server to collect the desired data and get back to the client as result.?

#productdevelopment #softwaredeveloper #apis #apidevelopment