It’s been a while since we talked much about APIs in this space, so it’s probably time we revisited the topic. APIs (short for application programming interfaces) are becoming more important in software development all the time, so it’s a good idea for both techies and their customers to have a little refresher on what APIs are, how they work, and why they’re so important these days.
Suppose you run the shipping department for a company that ships products all over the world. You convinced upper management to buy a device for your department that weighs each package and detects its dimensions—width, length, and height—and shows the results on a display on the device’s font panel. All the shipping clerk has to do is read the information and enter it into the company’s shipping software, which calculates the rate and prints the shipping label.
At some point in the recent past, you may have heard someone mention the term “API.” You probably recalled hearing this term before, and had some idea of what it meant. Perhaps you nodded knowingly, making a mental note to look it up when you got back to your desk. Maybe you followed up on it, or maybe you were distracted by the coffee brewing in the break room. It happens.
Even before there was such a thing as a digital computer, science fiction authors and other dreamers imagined sentient machines that could see and understand what they saw. Just the “seeing” part—identifying objects in an image—has proven to be one of the thorniest problems in computing. However, with recent advances in machine learning, we are now a step closer to realizing that goal: Google has released its Google Photos Cloud Vision API for developers everywhere to use.
