Summary
In this chapter, we covered some more information about web APIs. We discovered how they are structured and how we can interact with them in our applications. We even learned a bit about how they handle documentation and authentication.
Of course, this merely scratches the surface of information related to web APIs. A later course in the Computational Core curriculum, CC 515, covers web application development and goes in-depth about how to build and use web APIs using a RESTful architecture.
For this course, we’ll simply focus on making a small REST API for a portion of our ongoing project. This allows us to learn a bit about how we could construct our own web APIs and make them available for others.
Review Quiz
Check your understanding of the new content introduced in this chapter below - this quiz is not graded and you can retake it as many times as you want.
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# Web APIs
A **Web API** is best described by which statement?
1. [X] An interface for accessing and modifying resources stored on a web server
1. [ ] A method for changing the settings on a web server
1. [ ] A process for converting URLs into function calls on a web application
1. [ ] An access pipeline for cached data in a database
# SOAP
The **SOAP** acronym stands for what technology?
1. [X] Simple Object Access Protocol
1. [ ] Structured Object Address Protocol
1. [ ] Simplified Outcome Architecture Protocol
1. [ ] Standard Output Ansible Protocol
# SOAP Communication
The **SOAP** protocol was designed to use which data format to interact with a server?
1. [X] XML
1. [ ] HTML
1. [ ] JSON
1. [ ] CSV
# DL
The "DL" portion of the name **RESTful API DL** is short for what term?
1. [X] Description Language
1. [ ] Definition Language
1. [ ] Discussion Language
1. [ ] Design Language
# Security
The process of confirming a user's identity in a web application is known by what name?
1. [X] Authentication
1. [ ] Authorization
1. [ ] Accessibility
1. [ ] Accountability