API
Objective
The objective of this document is to give a basic understanding of what an API is, how it can be used and what are the benefit of using it.
Introduction
In today’s time, sharing data between systems is more important than ever. APIs make a variety of web products accessible to other systems as well as well as integrators.
API is short for application programming interface. Systems, applications, or libraries all can have APIs that allow to access their inner functionality or resources. E.g., a random generator library can offer the generation of random used in another application, so its developer does not have to write another random generator function. Or a Document Management System offers access to its stored documents by handling request via an API. So, an API is a means to provide services among the modules of a system or towards humans.
A well-documented API includes an API specification, describing the functionality it offers, the format of the request addresses/topics and the payload (e.g., JSON, XML), the parameter names and values it expects of the requests and the format, content and meaning of the replies it returns, including error messages/error codes and their meaning.
SICON.OS API Documentation
The API documentation is split in two parts.