Describing APIs

APIs Overview
Application Programming Interfaces
API is an acronym for "Application Programming Interface". It is the mediator (represented by a
piece of software) between applications/websites and you as a user. Therefore, it is vital for
communication between different instances to exchange information.

You encounter APIs in everyday life without you realizing it. An example is Google Search: Every time
you enter something into the search bar, Google's backend service looks up your keywords in its
database and lists your request's results on the website. Actually, the website displays the API's
result. An indicator for this is the URL of the respective search.

When thinking of a search for "SAP", the URL states: www.google.com/search?q=sap.

Now let us slice this one down:

Here www.google.com is the server address, /search indicates the feature you intend to use, or
better, the API you want to call, which in this case is the Google Search API, and q (for query) tells it
that now a value for query is handed over, which is the search term.

The same applies to SAP's help page (https://help.sap.com). When entering API into the search bar,
the following URL comes up: https://help.sap.com/docs/search?q=api.

However, an API call doesn't necessarily have to be initiated by a computer. Voice assistance
systems are also an example of the integration and use of APIs. Asking your voice assistant to search
for something actually provides the assistant with your query. This query is then stored as text and
added as the query to the API call. Afterward, the assistant gives out the API’s result via audio voice.
So, no matter what you do with any of your connected devices, you are using several APIs per hour
without noticing. This is why APIs are such an important topic, because they are omnipresent and
enable users and developers to focus on "what" needs to be done and not "how". Also, have you
ever thought about how your WhatsApp message gets sent to a recipient?

Therefore, as the name suggests, an API is just one of many types of interfaces used to trigger
specific functions, for example, playing music. You might already be familiar with other types of
interfaces, such as GUI (Graphical User Interface), which we use to navigate across
applications/websites with the help of a mouse/touchscreen.

Benefits of API's
The Need for APIs
APIs are indispensable for IT architectures nowadays. Although access from frontends to backends,
interface management, and point-to-point communication have been substantial parts of IT
architectures for years, APIs have revolutionized how applications and websites communicate.
Therefore, APIs have brought many benefits to building and managing IT landscapes. The most
important ones, and therefore key reasons why companies need to implement them in their IT
architecture, can be summarized as follows:

APIs, at their core, separate communication from the task. Thus, if a service communicates through
an API, the user (or consumer) of the API is entirely focused on the features the API provides. The
user only uses the API’s features without thinking about the job itself. The focus is based on the
request and the result (response) and nothing else.

Anatomy of APIs
API Types
For defining and implementing APIs, different global standards are available for use. A few of these
are listed below (however, the most commonly used are REST APIs):
With REST APIs as the most popular API type, we will briefly dig a little deeper into REST APIs
functions. When working with APIs, you usually speak of resources. This means that typically you
either want to:

• Create something (like adding a new entry to a guest book).

• Read or get something from the API (remember your Google Search: here you tried to get a
list of websites).
• Update or change something (usually when you have created something which needs to be
changed, like the status of something or if you made a typo).
• Delete something.

Together these actions are abbreviated as: CRUD.

For REST APIs these verbs are very similar to the CRUD verbs:

Comparison Between CRUD and REST Verbs

You may notice that "update" has two possible verbs: PUT & PATCH.

Patch only changes a part of the resource you are referring to. Think of your guest book entry, where
you correct one word only and would inform the guest book that word number 42 needs to be
swapped. This would be a patch - a spot on repair or change. PUT, on the other hand, would be
changing the whole text, even if it is mostly the same, but with the error corrected (think of clearing
the whole text and pasting everything in again).

Usually, when looking at an API's specification, these verbs are displayed as illustrated below
(retrieved from an example deployment on the SAP BTP Integration Suite). An API does not
necessarily support all verbs.
 Illustrating the SAP Business Accelerator Hub
The SAP Business Accelerator Hub offers you a wide range of sandbox APIs for several SAP products
like SAP S/4HANA, SAP BTP, SAP SucessFactors, SAP Concur, and more. You can use these sandbox
APIs to create extensions, applications or integrations and test these with testing data provided
through the sandbox API. All you need is the API key to authenticate your requests. You can get your
API keys by logging in with a SAP ID account on the SAP Business Accelerator Hub and choosing Show
API Key on the specific API page.

You can access the SAP Business Accelerator Hub here: https://api.sap.com/

API Reference in the SAP Business Accelerator Hub

You can browse through several sandbox APIs from several SAP products – for example, the Business
Partner API from SAP S/4HANA. You can get the reference and schema for the API. You can even try
out the APIs directly. The SAP Business Accelerator Hub is the place for developers and integrators to
discover, explore, and consume APIs.
 Illustrating the SAP Integration Suite
SAP Integration Suite

To have a completely connected IT landscape for your intelligent, sustainable enterprise, you need
to integrate the software solutions. With SAP Integration Suite, you get an integration platform as a
service (iPaaS) that allows you to seamlessly integrate on-premise and cloud-based applications and
processes with tools and pre-built content managed by SAP.

SAP Integration Suite

Modernize integration and future-proof your integration strategy:

Reduce complexity with AI-powered development and recommendations built into the tooling.

Deploy with trust and security through a cloud-native environment managed by SAP.

Enable AI-assisted business-to-business (B2B) integrations using popular electronic data interchange
(EDI) libraries and acknowledgment framework.

Achieve seamless business processes at scale:

Compose and innovate processes flexibly with API-led integration.

Respond faster to customers, employees, and partners with real-time processing.

Integrate applications across diverse application landscapes and ecosystems.

Accelerate connectivity of your business processes:

Take a system approach to solving common integration challenges with built-in guidance.

Support DevOps and simplify lifecycle management of integration artifacts.

Streamline any-to-any, SAP, third-party, and e-government integrations with thousands of pre-built
integrations and connectors.

You can find the latest descriptions and positioning of the SAP Integration Suite here:
https://www.sap.com/products/integration-suite.html

Built of the SAP Business Technology Platform Integration Suite

The SAP Integration Suite consists of a set of tools tailored for simplified enterprise integration of
hybrid, large, and heterogeneous environments.
The SAP Integration Suite is a SAP managed multi-cloud service that provides the flexibility to run the
same integration artifacts across multiple environments. Moreover, integration is further simplified
through the power of artificial intelligence.

SAP Integration Suite Example Use Cases

As an intelligent, sustainable enterprise, you need to integrate all the applications and business
processes to have a fully combined and integrated landscape.
To combine and integrate these solutions, you can use the SAP Integration Suite and its out-of-the-
box scenarios. In this way, you can integrate your system landscape based on your needs.

In addition to that, you can use the open connector capabilities from the SAP Integration Suite to
integrate non-SAP applications in this landscape too.

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