The future of API in 2014

Original author: Steven Willmott
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2013 was marked by impressive achievements in the development of API technology , as well as in its popularization and investment in this area. The number of APIs marked in ProgrammableWeb for the first time exceeded 10,000, there were serious cash injections and acquisitions associated with this technology, many new conferences were organized, including our own conference API Strategy and Practice, held in conjunction with API Evangelist . 2013 was marked by new initiatives, such as the API Commons , in which participants are trying to solve the long-term tasks of various sectors of the economy.

The number of existing user APIs that we support as part of our API management platform has doubled over the past year - and the same way the API traffic has grown. Therefore, after such an impressive 2013th, we wondered: what is preparing us for the new 2014th? And here are our forecasts!

1. (As expected) API growth: the obvious first forecast, according to which many new APIs will appear in 2014 - all indicators indicate that their number will only increase. The number of public APIs noted in the well-known lists has just reached 10,000, and there is still a huge number of private or semi-public APIs, which significantly exceed the public APIs. These private APIs include interfaces that belong to rapidly growing categories, including a mobile backend; API for SAAS integration; APIs that replace the integration of heavyweight B2B solutions and even APIs for home electronics hardware such as Philips Hue lightbulb.

In 2014, we expect that the number of public and private APIs created within these areas will grow from 100,000 to 200,000 - we have already approached the lower limit of this number, according to estimates that the ratio of private to public APIs is 9: one. We expect that the growth of the API will take place in two directions: firstly, new APIs will be released (as indicators of such growth, we note in 3scales hundreds of new registrations and dozens of launching APIs every month), and secondly, the availability of many private APIs as companies strive to reach a much wider audience.

2. Extension of common use cases for the API:the second and probably most important - along with an increase in the number of APIs - the assumption is associated with an increase in the number of types of companies starting the release of the API - among them are now sports equipment manufacturers, retailers, high-tech equipment manufacturers, construction companies, government and charitable organizations and representatives of almost every sector of the economy. We believe that this trend will also continue to develop. In a study for our recently released e-bookabout the economy of the API, we described five key options for using the API, from the capabilities of mobile platforms to the acceleration of business transactions, and all these five types of API values ​​seem to be interrelated - and can be applied in almost any sector of the economy.

3. The key issue in 2014 will be the copyright issue for the API: with the resumption of the copyright casebetween Oracle and Google Java, we again had a hunch about the future toughening of requirements for API specifications, and the matter, if the current solution is declared invalid, can have far-reaching consequences - up to the point that certain interface patterns will be protected by copyright from reuse. Although in some cases such protection may be justified, the application of copyright to the API can have a negative effect on the development of innovations, since it will “successfully” protect widely used and important patterns from third-party companies. Initiatives like the API Commons can help build the foundation for reusable patterns - but similar projects are in the early stages of development, so copyright disputes will be an important part of 2014.

4. The focus will be on service description technologies: one of the key challenges for the REST API is that API providers almost never publish allocated and moved metadata about their APIs that can be found and processed. Although some developing formats such as WADL and Swagger are currently available, and new formats like Blueprint and RAML, they solve the problem at best in part and are not common. This lack of automated descriptions makes the whole process of working with the API difficult, from generating stub libraries to finding the API - for example, the search engine API is unlikely to appear before the publication of such electronic descriptions becomes the norm.

As a result, we anticipate the emergence of debates related to industry and best practices on which formats to borrow, and the emergence of agreements on how to publish / find them. Without this, it will probably not be possible to organize public platforms for the API, such as ProgrammableWeb .

5. There will be new API aggregators: with an increase in the number of APIs, middle-level projects, such as Segment.IO , Zypr , appearand others, allowing you to combine several APIs of one particular segment into a single addressable API. This type of aggregator creates a single point of integration for several backend APIs. In some cases, the solutions offered by aggregators may seem unreliable due to the features of the APIs that they combine, but in other cases they are awaited with open arms, since solutions of aggregators reduce the complexity of the project for developers and reduce the cost of direct support. As the number of APIs increases, so does the number of areas in which aggregators will appear. The pace of using the API is ahead of the speed of their creation, which in combination leads to the following forecast ...

6. API development tools will be actively developed:Today, many tools for developing APIs from various vendors, such as, for example, Mashery, Apigee and others, are focused on providing API owners with the opportunity to provide their APIs to third parties. This is an important technology that is now being used everywhere. However, until recently, there were relatively few tools for API “consumers” - in particular, for developers to debug, monitor and track API usage within their applications. In 2013, several companies appeared to solve this problem - among them, companies such as Runscope and API Science. More such organizations will appear this year - including a new offer from 3scale. Innovation for developers using APIs has become crucial since even developers using well-documented APIs are now experiencing difficulties and frustrations towards their goal.

7. Single Page Application will become a new API development engine:The Single Page Application Architectures (or SPA) architecture for HTML web applications, which was made possible with the advent of HTML5, is currently undergoing significant growth. The SPA concept involves the use of HTML, CSS3 and Javascript to create an application that works by uploading a single HTML page to a web browser and then performing all the functions embedded in the application due to API requests to the backend server - in this application you Go to new web pages. We have already written about the impact of this technology on the API [ 1 , 2 ] and are observing the development of this trend. In particular, Javascript frameworks such as Angular.js are starting to gain in popularity , development tools are evolving, and new frameworks such asFamo.us , make the difficult development process on JS extremely attractive to the Web.

As a result, we expect that the SPA architecture will begin to become the norm for business applications / functional applications in 2014 and will gradually be used also in e-commerce and retail.

8. APIs for hypermedia will increase in popularity: APIs working with hypermedia are more flexible than traditional ones, since the responses returned to requests from such APIs contain certain “allowed” actions (this process is described in more detail here), providing the API with the ability to dynamically change the content of requests and thereby adapt to the current situation. However, now those who prefer hypermedia APIs to static URL APIs still have to compromise, although large-scale deployments of this technology are currently being seen in APIs from the Public Media Platform and the recently released Appstream API from Amazon.

It will take time for this technology to take root, but in 2014 we expect to see more vivid options for its use and more tools aimed at popularizing it.

9. APIs that work with data from civil institutions will be a breakthrough of the year:in an attempt to predict which categories of APIs will grow faster than others, we kept returning to APIs using information from civic institutions. The leadership of large cities, such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Helsinki, has already made large amounts of data available, so now is the time for APIs that provide urban infrastructure with data. And the townspeople, in turn, will be able to create applications and mashups on their basis, visualize the information received. This trend is becoming more and more popular - especially due to the fact that government agencies are prohibitively expensive to create all the web and mobile applications that citizens need: thus, access to such information opens up a new direction for innovation and opportunities for urban residents help ourselves.open311 , CitySDK and CityProtocol , are actively trying to standardize some of these interfaces for a large number of cities, which should accelerate the adaptation of the technology and at the same time expand the consumption markets of applications using such data.

10. Such native web technologies as openAuth, JSON and others will continue to grow and develop: in 2012-13, XML began to lose its popularity in terms of supporting public APIs - JSON became an upward trend in this direction. There have even been cases when companies that previously worked with XML stoppedsupport for this technology. This trend was also characteristic for 2013, marked by the appearance of many new APIs, oriented primarily to JSON and to a much lesser extent to XML. This trend, along with the popularization of other web-oriented standards, will probably remain valid in 2014, given that mobile and HTML5 + Javascript positively affect the growth in the number of APIs. Even where the APIs are primarily used for B2B integration (previously the former prerogative of SOAP / XML), mobile scripts are actively considered as additional options, which accordingly affect the choice of the final technology.

So, 2014 opens up exciting prospects for us and, without a doubt, prepares many surprises! We look forward to confirming or refuting our assumptions, as well as learning about something new and unexpected.

[Fabernovel, in turn, is working on practical seminars in this area, and if your company has an understanding that moving towards working with the API is necessary and promising, the first step can be to participate in such a seminar and work with our experts ... This , in many ways, a unique offer, so if you are interested, write to us.]

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