It Companies and respective developers alike are heavily leveraging API-based access to data and services, especially for mobile and cloud apps. And they're getting an increasing scope of technologies to choose from for managing all those API processes.
Companies acquired Layer 7 Technologies, MuleSoft,
Temboo, and WSO2 are tackling the API management need. Some secure
API access, some provide an API exchange, and some provide
cloud-based conduits to APIs :-
- Layer 7's API management suite offers back-end data and application integration, mobile capabilities, cloud orchestration, and developer management.
- MuleSoft's Any Point platform connects applications, APIs, and data sources across on-premise and cloud systems.
- Temboo offers a library of common-access APIs, with links to systems such as Facebook.
- WSO2's API Manager enables publishing of APIs, managing a developer community, and routing API traffic.
In some ways, API management is a follow-up to
service-oriented architecture (SOA), an approach to modular,
orchestrated software delivery that was the "it" enterprise
technology in the mid-2000s but later fell out of favor as too
academic and abstract for businesses paying the software architecture
bills. Nonetheless, SOA's principles remain as valid as ever and have
continued to be used -- especially in cloud offerings -- even as few
vendors and developers dare speak the term.
API management vendor Layer 7 also views API
management as the SOA successor, with SOA now geared to
behind-the-firewall operations and API management to exposing data
over the Internet to mobile applications and cloud services. SOA
strategies mostly target internal users while open Web APIs target
mostly external partners. API management requires developer portals,
key management, and metering and billing facilities that SOA
management never provided.
Because of the proliferation of API-enabled data
access from corporate applications via mobile devices, lighter-weight
REST-based APIs are gaining prominence over more-complex SOAP APIs.
API management vendors such as WSO2 and Layer 7 have thus added REST
support in their tools.
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