 Alright, welcome to the channel again. This time around I had promised you that I'd be chairing with you how to work with external APIs and in particular we're going to be building a plugin that sends SMS to the mobile phone. Alright, first things first, when we google the word API or when we go for the long what is an API, we find that we have a number of definitions but there's one that actually caught my mind in there is that an API or in full for application programming interface is basically a route of how different applications can communicate together and how they can exchange data and this can be through formats like JSON or XML. An API is then the messenger basically delivers a request to a provider and that request brings back information. Think of it like in a restaurant, our API would be a waiter or a waitress who would give our order and say I would like to have chicken, I would like to have vegetables ordered from the kitchen. So the waiter will go to the provider who is our chef for the night, the chef will prepare what is ready and on the menu and what is available and then send back that food through the waiter who's going to or the server who's going to serve us the food and then we're ready to take of it. So an API is that particular is just that interface that allows us to have two applications communicating to one another.