APIclients

API clients are software libraries or components that enable applications to consume external or internal APIs. They encapsulate the complexity of network communication and authentication, offering a language-native interface to perform operations such as creating, reading, updating, or deleting resources.

Clients may be generated from API specifications or implemented by hand. They typically map API endpoints to methods or functions, handle transport details, assemble URLs and headers, serialize request data, and deserialize responses into native data structures.

Common features include authentication handling, retries and timeouts, pagination support, rate‑limit awareness, and structured error mapping. Many clients support streaming, caching, and data-model bindings to native types. Generated clients often follow the conventions of a given language, while hand-written clients may expose more domain-specific conveniences.

Usage and maintenance: API clients improve developer productivity by reducing boilerplate and providing consistent error handling and logging. They require versioning and compatibility management to stay aligned with API changes. API clients exist for REST, GraphQL, and gRPC APIs, and may be produced in multiple programming languages.