The ABCs of APIs

APIs have become the essential connective tissue that enables companies to securely and quickly exchange data and information with the outside world. There is a growing interest in the use of APIs for businesses, which Colt is utilising to improve the experience of our customers. In this 2-part series, we will cover the basics of APIs and understand how and why we are using REST APIs to transform our Number Hosting APIs to maximise the experience of our Strategic Alliance customers.

What is an API? Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) define how software can request another software to provide data or to perform a task, by specifying:

• What requests can be made
• What data format to use

Types of APIs

• Private (for internal use only)
• Partnered (shared with specific partners to provide additional revenue streams)
• Public (allows third parties to develop apps that interact with your API to foster innovation)

Travel sites use APIs to collect flight and hotel availability from different providers, which allows them to aggregate thousands of flights and destinations to show the cheapest options to customers. In the telecoms space, APIs are offered by service providers to clients to program their applications to automatically request services while running, which is where our Number Hosting APIs come into effect.

How do we use APIs in our Colt Number Hosting solution?

Colt Number Hosting is our Wholesale SIP Trunking solution that enables Cloud Service Providers to expand their offering to include fully regulatory-compliant Voice with PSTN break out, with minimum effort and increased efficiency and simplification through business automation. Our APIs allow our Number Hosting customers to automate transactions into their own software, so they can spin up new nomadic and geographic numbers for their end-customers, submit port-in orders to retain their end-customers numbers, manage their orders and view their number inventory.

Why are APIs so important?

So this is how we use APIs in our Number Hosting product, and the importance of providing this is evident through the trends we see in the world today of 24/7 availability, ever-increasing connectivity, and a reliance on data. These trends have created new challenges for businesses and APIs are ever more present in today’s consumer and business environments as an answer to this. They have transformed the way businesses interact with each other and the value they provide to their customers by increasing automation, improving collaboration, simplifying innovation and enhancing security.

API protocols

As the use of APIs has increased, the need to standardise data exchange between web services has grown, so that diverse systems (e.g. different programming languages, different operating systems, or different technologies) can seamlessly communicate with each other. This has resulted in API protocols being created, with 2 of the most common being:

• SOAP (Service Object Access Protocol): lightweight protocol for exchanging structured information in a decentralized, distributed environment; that contains the syntax rules for request and response messages sent by web applications. APIs that comply with the principles of SOAP enables XML messaging between systems through HTTP or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) for transferring mail
• REST (Representational State Transfer): Software architectural style that defines the set of rules to be used for creating web services. Interaction in REST-based systems happens through Internet’s Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). RESTful systems support messaging in different formats, such as plain text, HTML, YAML, XML, and JSON, while SOAP only allows XML. The ability to support multiple formats for storing and exchanging data is one of the reasons REST is a prevailing choice for building public APIs these days

APIs provide a huge benefit for businesses and are a key element of our Number Hosting product. In the next post, we will take a look at how we are transforming our Number Hosting APIs to improve the customer experience and make us more competitive.