When focusing or comparing SOA versus API approaches, it’s easy to take shortcuts and thus not considering the whole scope. This inevitably brings the reflexion to a partial, if not wrong result. Across its blog and a SOA versus API trilogy, SOA software provides you with a realistic view of this exciting topic. Feel free… Continue reading →

With the launch of SOA Software OAuth Server, we’ve taken a huge step in the direction of providing easy, but secure, sharing of data across applications, APIs and domains. The effectiveness of an application is inhibited when the data contained in it can’t be used outside of a company’s firewall. So in creating a product… Continue reading →

When all the talk of security, scalability, manageability and all the other aspects of software is done, we can get the heart of the matter – developers. There may be a group of MBAs who spend months with PowerPoint and Excel to plan something really big, but it’s the software developers who execute and create.… Continue reading →

It has been a whirlwind for us, so we can only imagine what it’s been like for our customers and partners. We’ve been heads-down creating a variety of products, tools and processes to create a comprehensive enterprise API platform, and today we launched it at Cloud Expo West 2012. See press release here. Today we… Continue reading →

When a programmer sets out to construct a business-oriented API, he or she has to strongly consider what data format best fits the company’s needs, as well as the intended end-users. Some formats are more user-friendly than others, which makes them suitable for a consumer (B2C) application.  For a limited B2B interaction, a Web-friendly JSON… Continue reading →

More often than not, with simplicity comes greater risk. Making platforms more user-friendly tends to make them more easily compromised by system breaches, by virtue of the fact that there are more elements instituted – precisely to make an interface more readily embraced by a wider network – through which attacks can occur or software/hardware… 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 →

If you read any blog, publication, or marketing collateral on API management you can’t get more than a few sentences before the author throws out everyone’s favorite examples of API nirvana: Facebook, Twitter or the ever popular Netflix. It’s true that these companies pioneered the early days of API centric strategies, and the result changed… Continue reading →

I can’t stress enough that the best APIs are often the most basic. Typically, they do one thing really well and leave themselves open for developers to leverage as they please. So once you’ve finished the planning stages of your API, don’t just hand off your general plan to your coders and leave them to… Continue reading →

I may be generalizing, but too many people still view APIs as purely utilitarian. Integrate the Google Maps API into your GPS device so that users find the nearest gas station. Use NOAA Weather Service API to let skiers know the snow conditions in Telluride. And so forth. But people forget that APIs — and… 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 →

There is an excellent post on Kin Lane’s API Evangelist blog about The Battle for your API Proxy. I think a better title would have been ‘The Battle of Agents vs. Proxies’. Agents have been around forever in one form or another. When used to deliver API services, API agents are different than proxies because… Continue reading →