Things are always obvious in retrospect. This mantra applies just as much to the emergence of the enterprise of application program interface (API) from the exclusive use of specialists in the B2B arena to their widespread public consumption. Granted, the results of APIs have always been accessible to the public-at-large.  However, the current dynamic utility… Continue reading →

It used to be that companies employing the website visibility tactic of search engine optimization (SEO) could allow this to form the entirety of their online marketing strategy. Targeted visitors would come pouring into their site just based on the keywords. Even in the early days of the most popular application programming interfaces (APIs) –… Continue reading →

APIs are precisely the long-missing bridge in facilitating B2B interaction, addressing businesses that generally haven’t thought about their respective capacities for interfacing when they’re in production. This makes any future, mutually beneficial liaisons that much more difficult to execute. APIs lowers these technical barriers, allowing businesses to collaborate effectively in the interests of their now… Continue reading →

For the average business, building an Application User Interface today has more advantages than ever, and is worth the investment in time and resources.  The current landscape is generously accepting of APIs as a necessity for a business to maximize its interaction with the public upon which it depends, given the emergence of so many… Continue reading →

With the massive migration to the mobile platform, increasingly widening net of social media, and the blooming use of the cloud by most businesses, it can be tempting to think that enterprise API development and management will herald a whole new set of rules for the companies of today and tomorrow. The potentially dynamic universes… Continue reading →

The proliferation of APIs is a sign of the tech times, with many companies just starting to understand their power in the wake of both the social media explosion and the inroads that mobile marketing are making into the consumer sphere. For the business person who’s just coming onto this burgeoning scene, it’s certainly not… Continue reading →

By now, unless you’ve been on an extended vacation in a remote, unwired, non-connected country (actually sounds kind of nice) you’ve heard the promises around cloud computing: lower costs, eradicate daily management, massively reduced overhead, your health will improve, you’ll be better-looking and life will generally be better. So, maybe cloud doesn’t truly deliver on… Continue reading →

Like any product, creating a solid piece of software requires a lot of people focusing on doing what they’re really good at. Product managers focus on what the market wants and builds a list of requirements to deliver on that; developers create the product, refine it, add requirements and ensure it’s stable; a marketing team… Continue reading →

A common question we hear from customers is “Do I need an API?”. It is a fair bet that 95% of companies that ask that question already have one. Do you communicate with partners, dealers or other external entities via a [web] service or other externalized enterprise service? Then you probably have an API. It… Continue reading →

According to The Caine Mutiny, a Navy ship is a system “designed by geniuses to be run by idiots.”  You might be tempted to think a similar thought about today’s mobile applications.  Watching teenagers play with a mobile front end to what you and I know is a vastly complex enterprise back end, it’s seductive… Continue reading →

We’ve been actively encouraging our stakeholders to take advantage of Atmosphere to develop APIs and initiate an evolution in their applications that will enable them to become successful by capitalizing on existing assets. One of the things we’ve tried to communicate is the fact that API development can be relatively easy, even when done collaboratively… Continue reading →

Discussions about APIs have changed significantly during the past 10 years. I can remember talking with developers many years ago about very esoteric aspects of routines and data structures and it was all very, well, geeky. But at the same time, there was so much enthusiasm as Web APIs became more common, because to those… Continue reading →

Facebook’s billion dollar acquisition of Instagram is being touted as the harbinger of a major shift in computing from the desktop to mobile devices. It’s evident that mobile apps are the driving increasingly significant amounts of ecommerce, content, entertainment and other types of Web activity. Perhaps a more important aspect of this, if a less… Continue reading →

The Internet is widely understood to be about web pages made up of HTML in which humans search, browse and consume via their desktops and laptop computers using their favorite browser. Quickly other pioneers like Salesforce, Amazon, eBay, Twitter, Facebook and Google showed us another dimension of the Internet accessible via the same architecture as… Continue reading →

The X.Commerce Conference was a couple of weeks ago in San Francisco, where Paypal showcased their next generation of multi-channel commerce tools ranging from Paypal Access for quick consumer login, to expanded mobile, tablet and device based purchasing on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game consoles. Behind all the hype at X.Commerce, at the heart of every move EBay / Paypal… Continue reading →

While it is really important to build the right API and to build it right, it is equally important to make sure that it’s running right, or to be more grammatically correct, to ensure that your API is behaving correctly. By now you should have planned and built, a clean simple API that delivers clear… Continue reading →

The five steps of our set of best practices work like a combination lock. They work properly only if they are followed in sequence. Planning is perhaps the most important step in the API lifecycle because it puts forth the blueprints needed to build a sucessful API. During the planning stage, your organization needs to… Continue reading →

Last week, Experian Hitwise released a report that said that Google Plus, the latest social networking adventure from the search giant, was seeing a decline in visits just a month after it was launched. In addition, the report states that Facebook visitors spent 4 times as long per visit as those on Google+. Of course,… Continue reading →

OSCON ’11, O’Reilly Media’s annual event for all things Open Source, is going on this week in Portland. Of course, this got us thinking about the relationship between Open Source and APIs, and the possibilities of a harmonious blend between the two. First, what is the difference between open source and open APIs? Quite a… Continue reading →

Today’s concept of API is at once too broad and too narrow. Developers tend to take the acronym literally, seeing it specifically as a programming interface designed to be used by another application. Meanwhile, business decision-makers view APIs as some cutting-edge technology that will make their businesses run better, improve the customer experience or maybe… Continue reading →