API, or “application programming interface,” is a set of routines, programmatic requests, and protocols that enable developers to request services from a program. APIs make it possible to retrieve information, share data and interact between applications. APIs save valuable time by simplifying the ability to interact between different applications. These days, most major web services offer API access, such as those provided by Facebook’s Graph Search API, Google Analytics API and so forth.
To illustrate, the Dynamic Yield API was designed to give developers programmatic control over personalization initiatives, allowing them to target activation based on specific page content or events, and enabling them to retrieve or send data.
Dynamic Yield offers three types of APIs: JavaScript API, server side API and Mobile SDK. To use the JavaScript API, for instance, developers need to place the Dynamic Yield JavaScript snippet on every page they want to optimize. The API initiates a queue on the page and all event calls are pushed to the queue. Once the Dynamic Yield script is loaded successfully, it will sample the queue and execute the reported events.
