Howdy, Are you a Laravel dev? Or learning Laravel in deep? Then you must hear the term API, right? API (Application Programming Interface) is a very common thing nowadays in the world of software development. Modern web applications can’t think of it. It’s a great medium for data sharing and data authenticity. If you are/want to be a backend developer, learning to integrate API is a must. But how to make them?
As API is an intermediate level concept, I am assuming you are pretty familiar with PHP and Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), Composer and you build/started building pieces of stuff using Laravel. If you’re not familiar with them I highly recommend you to learn them first. For a clear understanding, I broke down this tutorial into two parts. In this part, I will discuss the concept/methodology behind API building and JWT. And in the part 2, I will implement them using JWT and Laravel. If you have a basic concept of them, you can skip this part and move on to the next part.
So what is API?
API is the acronym for Application Programming Interface, which is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other. Each time you use an app like Facebook, send an instant message or check the weather on your phone, you’re using an API. It’s a way of data communication. It lets you share/store/validate data from your application to other applications and vice versa. If you want to share some data publicly/privately to some other application, will you let them modify/access your database? Of course, not, there comes the vital role of API. You can share an endpoint to others where they can store/retrieve data with proper validation and authentication.
Before we dive deep, let’s clear some core concepts and processes to _authenticate _a user using API. So now comes the question, what is authentication? I often see people get confused between authorization and authentication.
_Let’s imagine a scenario. You joined/work in an IT company. Whenever you try to enter your office you need to pass the main gate of the building and a guard sitting there asks your identity so that he can be sure that you belong to this office. You somehow(showing you ID card/finger punch) managed to prove your identity and get inside the office building. Now you got a cabin/desk of your own and went there started working. After some time you thought to take a coffee break and went to the canteen/food court of your office. After that, you wanted to look at the server room of the IT department and you got stopped and asked to __verify _yourself once again as the room is only open for a few people. As you don’t have access there, you returned to your desk and started working again.
#laravel #jwt #api #authentication #php
