What is a "third party platform"?

Hello devs, welcome to kodequotes, in todays article we are going to understand what is meant by 3rd party platforms in relation to technology. And also talk into how we can manage their usage.

Third party as a minor role

A third party is someone or a company which is not one of the main people involved in a business agreement or legal case, but who is involved in it in a minor role. Example, you can instruct your bank to allow a third party to remove money from your account. Or you can setup a third person to mange your social media account for you. From this view, we can understand 3rd party as anyone you can call upon to manage your tech platform for you. You sometimes need to assign privileges to them to operate on your behave. A third party service is something that can frequently be seen in our tech environment.

In the situation of a third party as a minor role, do your best to know the person that you would like to manage your social media platforms or other platforms before entrusting them as third parties to manage your accounts. As a bad person would possibly takeover your accounts once privilages has been assigned to him or her.

Third party as a package manager

Third party platforms could also be seen mostly in package managers. Example is pip from python which allows programmers or developers to download their python dependencies from third party platforms, also there is npm thus node package manager which is used for downloading frameworks or libraries for various development. Composer which is a package manager for php programming language which also allows php developers to include third party softwares into their projects.

As a developer, I have been using third party frameworks and libraries and they are very helpful as it saves a developer time from re-inventing the wheel. Supposing you would like to implement emails in your php website, you could decide to use the built in mail() function but this is not very reliable. You could simply go in for PHPMailer library which already has all the classes and methods created to do the job better. You just need to install via the composer then you are good to go.

But before going in for a third party package, at least do well to search on it ratings and reviews to find out if it is safe to use it in your systems. There has been reported cases where people get malwares from third party packages. 

Third party as an external service provider

In one of my ecommerce platforms where I needed to integrate a payment gateway service, I had a lot of third party platforms I could work with including paypal, paystack, google pay and other related platforms. These platforms becomes third party providers to me since they are not directly linked with the ecommerce company I was working with.

As a point to note, always do background checks on these external service providers you may like to work with before moving in to integrate their API's into your system. You can begin by doing a simple google search on their credibility to know how trusted they are because not every service on the internet can be trusted.

Conclusion

In conclusion, third party platfroms / services can be very helpful to use or work with, but a developer must always note to perform footprinting about these services or persons before working with them.