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