You’re probably familiar with browsing the internet and some of the basic mechanics of how that works. You have a client, or a browser, and you’re making requests to a web server, then getting some response that your web browser assembles into web pages and that’s how you browse the web.
An API stands for application programming interface – it’s basically how one piece of software can talk to another piece of software.
APIs fundamentally work in more or less the same way.
Building blocks for your software
Application programmers have the software that they are building, and that software basically requests specific components or parts from other software (like a website), and then takes that response and assembles that into the working application that they’re building.
Suppose you’re building an application where you want to get a specific resource from a web service and use it. It could be a picture, a weather forecast, or in our case at Digital Samba it could be a live video stream.
That web service will have a structured way that a programmer will be able to specify that particular asset or resource, in other words an interface, and then the web service will usually respond with that request in a structured way that your application knows how to accept and open up to get the resource it requested. Just like ordering parts for a machine you are building.
Build customized video conferencing applications
So in our case, a developer is building a customized application that requires some solution that we do perfectly. They may want to embed a real time video feed in an iOS or Android app, or build an audio and video sharing tool that works on mobile and web applications – it could be anything that you dream up and your development team is tasked with building.
The way they go about achieving that is through our API. We essentially provide them with building blocks around what we specialize in, such as high quality video, screen sharing, chat solutions, and general video chat – there’s a lot of those kinds of things that we can provide, but basically any feature that Samba Live offers can be utilized through our API by your developers.
We at Digital Samba are advocates for the open source community, so we make our API available for developers to tinker around with. You can find technical details on how our API works here.
What can you do with our web services?
This is pretty much limited only by your imagination. But we do provide a suite of building blocks and tools related to enterprise grade video communication for application developers. So here’s some things you can build while using our web resources.
- We’ve been pioneers in live chat solutions – and we’ve made that available through our API. So, suppose you want to have your company website to have a specific live chat feed from one of your Samba Live chat rooms right there in the web page itself.
- Maybe you’re making some in-house video calling apps, and your developers work out how they want to connect the callers and they need us to add video to the call. Well, we have a way of doing that, too.
- We offer advanced account management features through our API so you can create new users, add phone numbers and more.
- Or you might just want to integrate video from a webcam into an IoT project. We can help you with that.
At Digital Samba, we are software OEMs. Most other developers build software ‘out of blocks’. But we make our own blocks from scratch. Through our API, we are enabling your developers to build with our blocks.
