Often while talking about the API, I heard developers talking about the Magento SOAP API or the Magento XML-RPC API or the RESTful API. But the important fact is 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 own 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 those APIs have been RESTful APIs.
Before we...