The evolution of the API by Phil Wilkins

February 1, 2018 Leave a comment

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The level of talk and adoption of APIs has been really picking for sometime now. So what is the fuse about? After all the idea of an API isn’t exactly new, for those of us who started out with C will point to header files as being a simple API, a bit more recently and you’d point to Java interface classes, then there has been SOAP+WSDL and that’s before we have even talked about CORBA, EJBs and standards for interchange like ebXML etc.

Well, I think we have seen several things. Firstly compute power has now reached a stage where the abstraction costs of are viewed as fairly negligible in most scenarios. When it comes to defining APIs, we have found a sensible balance between precision of definition and simplicity to define and develop. Recognition that there is raw value is data and therefore exposing the data for use creates revenue opportunities. Then along came microservices – an approach among other things that needs APIs to help manage, measure and if necessary control interactions without which we can end up with a new type of monolith bound together by a raft of unseeable cross deployment calls.  Oracle Ace Director Luis Weir and I discussed this at the recent Oracle Code London event (more here).

To realise APIs in a manner that is far more effective than those earlier approaches I mentioned, means some tools, platforms and some (defacto) standards are needed. So we have the tools to describe the APIs to a level where test frameworks and stub solutions can be generated without being cumbersome and easy to document and share. Look at the Swagger toolset and APIary which supports the Open API and API Blueprint standard notations. Read the complete article here.

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Unknown's avatarAbout Jürgen Kress
As a middleware expert Jürgen works at Oracle EMEA Alliances and Channels, responsible for Oracle’s EMEA Fusion Middleware partner business. He is the founder of the Oracle SOA & BPM and the WebLogic Partner Communities and the global Oracle Partner Advisory Councils. With more than 5000 members from all over the world the Middleware Partner Community is the most successful and active community at Oracle. Jürgen manages the community with monthly newsletters, webcasts and conferences. He hosts his annual Fusion Middleware Partner Community Forums and the Fusion Middleware Summer Camps, where more than 200 partners get product updates, roadmap insights and hands-on trainings. Supplemented by many web 2.0 tools like twitter, discussion forums, online communities, blogs and wikis. For the SOA & Cloud Symposium by Thomas Erl, Jürgen is a member of the steering board. He is also a frequent speaker at conferences like the SOA & BPM Integration Days, JAX, UKOUG, OUGN, or OOP.

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