If you’re a developer or work for a company with a development team, chances are you use APIs to improve efficiency. If you aren’t making use of APIs, you’re missing out on a raft of benefits, while your sales, marketing and other teams could be losing out too. But what are APIs and what benefits can they bring? In this article, we’ll explain everything you need to know about APIs, as well as how at LemonEdge, our API is at the centre of what we do.
What is an API?
API stands for Application Programming Interface. An API allows two different applications to communicate with each other, in a way that allows sharing data. This effectively expands your codebase, providing new business opportunities inside your systems.
An everyday example of an API is a phone app like Google Maps. When you request a map, the app connects to the internet and sends information to a server. The server retrieves the information, interprets it, takes the appropriate actions and sends it back to your phone. The software then analyses the data and displays the information you requested in a way you can easily understand (in this case, a map). This entire process happens using an API.
Benefits of APIs
In today’s economy, APIs are everywhere, playing an increasingly critical role. APIs allow us to share information and create exciting new functionalities in devices, apps and even inside businesses. APIs are all around us, fuelling our lives from behind the scenes, with most of us blissfully unaware.
When you incorporate APIs into your development workflow, you reap several rewards, including:
- Higher productivity
- Less monolithic applications
- Decreased development time
- Cost savings
- Better connectivity and collaboration
- Greater innovation
- Enhanced customer experience
How we use APIs at LemonEdge
At LemonEdge, we have an API that can be used to do almost anything you can do through the conventional user interface. It’s so essential to what we do, we actually use the API ourselves when generating entities from basic interfaces.
Further to common API functionality, with our API, you can submit runnable units of code, validating and compiling it on the fly. This helps with custom validation, algorithms, and connectivity. It’s what makes our platform so versatile.
When you use the LemonEdge API for your entities, you get all the integrated LemonEdge platform functionality, including:
- Complete auditing – including the ability to run a system as of previous points in time
- Permissioning – down to individual record level
- Reporting
- Data integration
- Algorithms
- Canvases (isolation from the live system) and more
All this takes place through a simple API, with minimal effort on your part.
LemonEdge is intended to be a low-code to no-code platform, which means that you should be able to solve your business problems without writing a single line of code. We currently use our API to get you 90% of the way to everything you need in a no-code environment. The API enables us to add that remaining 10% in a-low code format, so you can achieve 100% of what you need to do. The API-enabled 10% is where our system gives our end-users 10x faster workflows and solutions.
Want to know more?
To find out more about the LemonEdge API and how it can make a difference to your business, visit the API page on our site today.
