Now that your application is complete and ready for the world to see, you might start thinking of ways to make it more popular. What if you wanted to allow external systems with access rights to your data in a way that they could mass produce inserts to your website without the need for users to visit the actual website? One example that comes to mind almost immediately is suppose users of another website, say www.facebook.com, can upload an image to Facebook and have it automatically uploaded to your website as well; can this be done?

The only way to make a scenario like this even possible is by providing an API to your data and code that gives external developers access to a suite of tools that will allow them to perform actions without the need to interact with the actual web pages.

In this chapter, we will review the following topics: