Why developers are turning to API services ?

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.