Let external applications communicate with your database and your site?

Question

i understand the term used all over social networking sites is API, read a few googles, it seems to be completely independent very big topic to cover i have limited time

as seem from my previous post, i was trying to make a social networking site using asp.net 3.0 and c#, and am successful at doing so.

its a small prototype.

a few tables such that the record of friends and there friends and their interest is kept

there are no privacy constraint at the moment

what i would like is to, "welcome developers please download the API for free and start making applications for the social network"

consider application extracts interests of the friends of a friends who is using the application.

from what i understand, API A SPACE TO HOST APPLICATION either provided by me or the developer arranges it.

help by providing small examples, source codes, to the point tutorial

thank you

Answer 1

APIs are an interface to (all or some of) the functionalities of your application. In your particular scenario you can expose Web-apis by allowing remote http calls (for example by using web services).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface#Web_APIs

Answer 2

It's a bit more complicated than just "Right-click add API..." but you have a few options:

WCF, WCF rest, and Data Services / oData

If you're in a desparate hurry to get an API out the quickest way will be to use oData/Data Services, you basically make your database queryable via the web. (You can restrict Read/Write access.)

It's as simple as creating an Entity Framework model for your database, and exposing that as a WCF Data Service and you're done.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/bb931106.aspx

http://www.odata.org/developers/odata-sdk