Should businesses bank on APIs to solve the legacy conundrum?
It is imperative for banks and other financial services businesses to ‘go digital’, in response to legislation (i.e., PSD2) and to increasing pressure from smaller, more nimble fintechs.
What are perceived and actual security concerns for APIs?
APIs are rapidly becoming one of the most important infrastructural layers of the Internet while at the same time becoming a critical component of modern day attacks. They are difficult to secure and determined hackers are extremely tenacious in finding ways to exploit them. Despite what some people — even experts — would lead you to believe, there are no silver bullets. That said, when proactively managed and secured, the efficacy of APIs greatly outweighs the risks associated with deploying them.
How to build for change in a cloudy world
The cloud market is on the rise, with organizations drawn to the promise of increased agility, reduced costs and improved operational efficiency. According to Gartner, the worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 21.4 percent, from $153.5 billion in 2017 to $186.4 billion in 2018. Yet, while most organizations are using multiple clouds or deploying hybrid cloud environments, it is rarely part of a thought-out strategy. More often than not,
From monolith to microservices – an architect’s first-hand account (Part 2)
This is a guest blog from a member of the MuleSoft community. Brad Cooper is a senior developer with more than 20 years professional experience in a variety of tools and languages, including Anypoint Platform. He holds numerous MuleSoft certifications, – including MuleSoft Certified Developer: Integration Professional – and hopes to add MuleSoft Certified Architect: Solution Design Specialist in the near future.
In my last post I described how and why,
Why GDPR compliance is a ready-made problem for APIs
If you were existing anywhere but under a rock for the last few weeks, then you were probably subjected to a gauntlet of GDPR notifications from the websites that you frequent, including ProgrammableWeb. They may not have even mentioned GDPR or the General Data Protection Regulation. But the sudden onslaught of these messages while visiting those sites, or via email, or both was unquestionably due to the mad rush by website operators (your’s truly included) to meet the May 25 deadline for complying with the sweeping privacy regulation that was established by the European Commission (EC).
APIs in the world of IT operations
In a previous life, I worked primarily with the operational side of the IT business, which is concerned with monitoring and operational alerting. The requirements we implemented were variations on a theme that typically started with the business asking IT to provide an SLA for “availability” of a service as well as an SLA for the responsiveness of a service. On the surface, these requirements were clean and simple, but in practical terms, things got murky very quickly.
ProgrammableWeb’s most popular APIs of 2017
Last fall we wrote an article that examined which APIs draw the most interest from developers. In that article we relied upon the API tracking functionality that each profile has as the metric for determining which APIs are the most popular. As many users of ProgrammableWeb know, reader’s can track any asset on ProgrammableWeb.com (APIs, SDKs, even search results) in the same way they can track stocks on a financial site. If anything new happens to that asset (if it gets updated,
Why APIs are not just for tech companies
Looking across the entire landscape of software that businesses buy, it is clear that APIs are becoming a competitive differentiator for companies of all sizes.
APIs versus web services
What is the difference between web APIs and web services? Let’s start off with an analogy: all tigers are cats but not all cats are tigers. In a similar way, all web services are APIs, but not all APIs are web services. Web APIs and web services are often confused with each other; however, web APIs are an evolution of web services. Both facilitate information transfer, but web APIs are more dynamic than web services are.
What type of API is right for my project?
There are various types of APIs, the most popular of which is Web API––otherwise known as a Web Service. A Web API provides an interface for Web applications, or applications that need to connect to each other via the Internet to communicate. Web APIs have exploded exponentially, reaching over 17,000 in 2017. There are four popular subcategories of Web APIs, including SOAP, XML-RPC, JSON-RPC, and REST.