The Core API

Often, while talking about the API, I heard developers talk about the Magento SOAP API, the Magento XML-RPC API, or the RESTful API, but there is the important fact that these are not separate APIs for each of these protocols. Instead, Magento has a single Core API.

As you might notice, Magento is built mostly around abstraction and configuration (mostly XML), and the Magento API is no exception. We have a single Core API and adapters for each of the different protocol types. This is incredibly flexible, and if we want to, we can implement our adapter for another protocol.

The core Magento API gives us the ability to manage products, categories, attributes, orders, and invoices; this is done by exposing three of the core modules:

The API supports three different types: SOAP, XML-RPC, and REST. Now, if you have done web development outside Magento and with other APIs, it is most likely that these APIs have been RESTful APIs.

Before we jump into...