Developing web services and API's
Webservices and API's are ways to connect data from different systems.
We use web services in 2 ways:
- Building (RESTful) web services to provide data to other applications.
- Integrate other web services to use data in web applications
We build these web services with different technologies: Laravel and Symfony.
Depending on the application architecture, we integrate with other web services directly in the frontend layer (JavaScript) or via the backend (PHP) application layer.
When developing a web application, we often use external systems to retrieve data that we do not have available in our own system. This ensures that we can try to work with only one place where the truth of the data can be found.
Keep talking about API's?
Do you need an integration between existing systems? Or do you need to make different datasets available to other apps via API's & Webservices? We know what to do!
Web Integrations
Do you already have an existing application (CRM, online calendar management, administration software, order system) and would you like to link it to your website? In most cases a custom API link is required. In that case we will develop a web application for you that forms the glue between the systems. We call this an "intermediate layer" (middleware).
In its simplest form, this is a simple data translation layer. This layer provides a translation between the various other applications and converts the data to another form where necessary.
For many applications it is not enough just to offer the same data to your external system, but you want to modify or enrich this data through an interface. To solve this problem we use Laravel Nova, a user-friendly administration panel. We use an API on the one hand to retrieve your data and on the other hand you can modify and enrich this data in the user interface. You can then offer this enriched data back to other applications, using your own API.

When we develop API's and web services ourselves, we always choose a RESTful API. Outdated solutions such as SOAP or XML-RPC have many drawbacks.
There are also different ways of pouring this data into a format that can be read by other applications. For this we often choose JSON:API. This modern data format is flexible, fast and reliable.
We also often use this architecture when building a decoupled web application. For example, we build a stand-alone, interactive JavaScript application with a PHP API backend to control the data.
Want to know more?
Would you like to know more about how we can use these API's to build a custom web application?