• In the early days, there was just one API design tool to use, Apiary.io. Now at the end of 2014, we have four separate API design tools to choose from. I credit Apiary.io for opening up this new era of API design, expanding the API lifecycle, and emphasizing healthy API design practices over just API deployment and management.

   
• There are three API design tools, from each of the providers of the modern API design formats:
• Apiary.io - Collaborative design, instant API mock, generated documentation, integrated code samples, debugging and automated testing using the API Blueprint API definition format.
• API Designer | Anypoint API Portal - Enables the ability to design APIs in the RAML API definition format, and mock, preview and save API designs into a notebook, and integrate with other Mulesoft API tooling.
• Swagger Editor - Allows the designing APIs in the Swagger format in both YAML and JSON, allowing you to import, edit, preview, and export API design docs.
• All three of these API design tools are developed by the creator of the leading API definition formats, API Blueprint, Swagger, and RAML.

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• While HP has had API management assets in development for some time, it is a relatively new entrant to the broader API market. Nearly all of its prior deployments where focused on large global communications services providers (CSPs). However, with the advent of HP's Helion initiative – a refactoring and rebranding of its portfolio of IT products and services based on OpenStack – HP's API team is attracting internal investment for further development and targeting opportunity in the broader global enterprise market.
• The roots of HP's API management platform are grounded within its communications industry portfolio of products and services.
• The portfolio is comprised of four clusters that include offerings that provide Actionable Customer Intelligence (Business Support Services [BSS]), Operational Support Systems (OSS) for service assurance and fulfillment, and Media and Entertainment, which provide content delivery and management offerings.
• HP believes that the API technology it developed to assist its carrier clients is well suited to extend to the enterprise market. Several high-profile industry initiatives are creating new business models and eco-systems. Among them are the connected home, connected car, smart IT, M2M connectivity and communications, and smart personalized advertising – all of which rely heavily on a variety of APIs for interconnectivity and interoperability. In response, HP is tailoring its API management to facilitate the exposure, governance and monetization of enterprise assets and enable new business partnerships though the exchange of data and services.
• Real rivalry can be found from the 'born in the cloud' vendors such as MuleSoft, 3scale Networks, Apigee and those vendors acquired by IT giants serious about the market such as Intel Mashery and CA Technologies' Layer 7. 'Born on the Web' rivals to HP with broader development capabilities include WSO2 and SOA Software.

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• Apigee today announced a new version of Apigee Insights that processes connected data to form an API graph a for developers to build predictive apps. The new analytics platform provides a function similarly to Google Now, which anticipates, for example, where a person is traveling and how long it will take to get there.
• It’s a graph analytics platform that has three attributes: users, nodes and paths. The user is the individual, the nodes are things people do and properties of the nodes. A purchase, for example, means A, B, or C. And paths that connect users through a sequence of nodes.
• Each person represents a massively long attribute structure across the nodes that is represented on Hadoop to act questions against it.

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• What is an API?
• THE USE OF APIs
• Principally, APIs are used to give access to internal data and sources to those outside the firewall. More recently, the use of APIs has been popularly extended to non-developers and the general public. At its simplest, anyone who uses social media uses API, because it is API that makes the web so social.
• DO YOU NEED API?
• For businesses, and brans, APIs are today what a website was ten years ago. A well-developed API will help catapult businesses since it strengthens the way business relationships are established and maintained in 24X7 online economies.
• Reasons to have API:
• Innovation fail-safe
• Play the audience
• Spread utility
• Customize strategy
• Remove resource bottlenecks

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• Part of what makes the cloud so agile is the new approach to programmability that comes from adding APIs, and the management layer has been lagging in that department. Intigua is positioning itself as a fix to add APIs to unruly parts of the stack that refuse to modernize, while at the same time working with cloud-native management systems like Chef, Puppet, Dell Cloud Manager and VMware vCAC
• As we have noted, there are few (if any) companies that compete directly with Intigua's core technology. Certainly, the ability to use virtual machines and images to deploy software could substitute, and companies that provide a way to pack over such approaches – BitNami, ElasticBox and the Docker ecosystem – could work here as well

• Mashery developed technology and services that provide API management capabilities, including developer enablement tools; administrative, reporting and analytics tools; and community tools – and had established a substantial developer network.
• Aepona created software that lets service providers open up their networks to developers by leveraging APIs that enable them to offer communications, context, commerce and control features that enrich business applications.
• Intel's strategy is similar to that of CA with its acquisition of Layer 7 for API management. Both are pursuing similar efforts and markets. CA is focused on enterprises, helping them use APIs for partner enablement and application integration. Intel is directly targeting cloud and mobile networking telecommunications service providers by exploiting prior Aepona customer relationships.

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• GE Software plans to publish APIs that allow developers to add value to the Predix platform that the industrial giant has created to manage the broad range of equipment it builds and services as part of a platform it calls the industrial Internet.
• Predix is a set of IoT applications designed to merge the physical worlds of machines with analytical data to create software-defined machines that will ultimately eliminate unplanned downtime, Chauhun says. Those efforts should ultimately eliminate $150 billion in waste that currently occurs when industrial systems unexpectedly go offline. The industrial Internet itself has been valued at trillions of dollars by GE.
• GE is trying to move its industrial systems support from a break/fix model to a predictive services capability where potential issues are resolved before the system fails.

• Chauhun says GE doesn’t plan to charge customers for Predix. Instead, the conglomerate sees Predix as a way to reduce, for example, support costs that would ultimately enhance its profitability.

   

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• The API rating agency 

       
• How to stabilize the API economy? With trust. Here I am trying to find a rating model that helps developers manage risk and opportunities in using APIs. Every critical point of view is welcome, this is a tool for us, let's build it together. Mehdi Medjaoui, from Webshell.io
• Patents provide juridical and commercial protection and market monopoly in counterparty of publications and explanations of scientific inventions
• Now we are in the numerical revolution, in an economy of knowledge and the real gold or asset of companies is the data.

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• Mulesoft released their RESTful API modeling language RAML, late last year. The language could end up being just a proprietary vendor language, but there are a number of reasons why this language is interesting to the broader API community: 
• RAML has been open-sourced along with tools and parsers for common languages.
• Mulesoft originally started with Swagger but realised that standard was best suited to documenting an existing API, not for designing an API from scratch.
• RAML evolved out of the need to support up-front API design in a succint, human-centric language.

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• John Musser, founder of ProgrammableWeb, and now founder of API Science, is the first one to tell you that APIs are often not truly great. Yesterday at Gluecon, he told a packed breakout session how they can avoid that fate.
• So, here are Musser’s reasons/problems, and the ways to fix them
• #1 Your documentation sucks.
• #2 Your communication skills need work and you don’t keep your developers informed.
• #3 You don’t make it easy.
• #4 One word: Lawyers.
• #5 Your API is unreliable.
• #6 You don’t give me tools to help me succeed
• #7 You’re marketing to me, you’re not helping me.
• #8 Your API Is Too Complex - and You Have Your Own Customs.
• #9 Your TTFHW (time to first ‘hello world’) is too long.
• #10 You haven’t learned - from the best.

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• This post is the first in a series that will examine the broader reality, where APIs have become a foundational technology for the development of robust and scalable enterprise applications. We will examine some of the important implications of the movement to the API-centric architecture that is underway within enterprise application development.

   

• Today’s software is built as services. Rather than using web frameworks that invoke services and produce web pages, today's applications are built by consuming and producing APIs. Applications have embraced APIs on the front end for connecting to rich clients; on the backend for integrating with internal systems; on the sides for enabling other applications to access their internal data and processes; and within, as applications are composed of a set of component services, linked together with APIs.

   
• All development is API development
• As this model of web development became common, traditional page-based web analytics was hampered, but developers soon found that moving to API-based interaction analytics gives them greater abilities to capture and analyze web usage. JavaScript enables detailed observation of where app users spend time and what they are doing within the applications. These analytics can be transmitted to analytics APIs in a constant stream of interaction data.
• APIs move to the front end

• The mobile app represents a return to the more strongly delineated client-server model of development, where all interactions happen client-side and a constant networked communications mechanism between client and server must be maintained.

   

• Integration architectures assume that applications are developed without considering whether to enable other applications to access their internal data and processes. Before the conventions of APIs were widely adopted, this was a prudent strategy. Trying to support application-to-application integration was an undue burden for the developer and was usually left as a project for another team.

   
• Mobile forces the issue
• APIs open enterprise applications

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• APIs are the engine of all these transactions of data, commerce and communication, so naturally we obsess about how to keep APIs and the data they work with, secure and authenticated. Our conversations with customers and partners all usually come back to security at some point. We want you, as stakeholders in SOA Software, to understand what it means to create and work in a secure application environment, so we’ve created this resource guide to give you a primer on API Security:

• On the surface, it appears that Pandora, despite its head start of at least a decade on most of its competitors, is facing an uphill battle. It’s not just the number of services that are potentially coming online but also the number of songs and the amount of data those services are offering up to consumers.

• John Musser is CEO of API Science and previously founded ProgrammableWeb, the leading online resource on open APIs.

• An API -- Application Programming Interface -- at its most basic level, allows your product or service to talk to other products or services. In this way, an API allows you to open up data and functionality to other developers, to other businesses or even between departments and locations within your company.

• Mashape is a collaboration environment for API developers.
• It provides a product catalog, manages sales and collects payments.
• it's basically an e-commerce engine for publishers of Web services, APIs and other bits of code.
• Mashape hopes to become the eBay of cloud services, a bold objective fraught with extraordinary challenges and potential rivals.
• Indeed, the need for such a service escapes most business and IT professionals, but it is gaining popularity among sophisticated technologists now experimenting with cloud, mobility and machine-monitoring initiatives.
• Mashape does not sell tools, but rather, has created an object broker service for cloud computing that acts as a hub to document, distribute, monetize and consume APIs.

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