The next ten years will be all about open APIs
Add to 
del.icio.us
 Digg this
Get a great Ubuntu Linux dedicated server for less than $3 a day!
Share on Twitter
Dec. 30, 2011
The last ten years were all about open source. Now you can expect that the next decade will be all about open APIs
(application programming interfaces). But as with open source software, APIs aren't necessarily a guarantee of immediate
success to those that participate.
Some will succeed and some will fail. The exact outcome will be determined by who gives software developers the best access to data, and that access is a
function of open APIs. Like proprietary software, there are proprietary APIs, and those will continue to be closed as
they've been in the past, with maybe a few exceptions. But open APIs will be like what open source has been since
about the year 2000.
Some countries may focus on new ways to get consumers to spend more money in an effort to rebuild their economies,
but the world's economies are increasingly dependent upon software services that are created by programmers and developers.
These software developers are behind many of the important creations of the 21st Century: Google, Twitter, Facebook
and a few more. And in order to to succeed, such developers need APIs-- lots of them in fact. And most importantly, they
all need to be standardized and well-documented if they are to work well and integrate themselves seamlessly in the rapidly
expanding internet community.
Given the importance of today APIs, it is still surprising to see just how difficult it can be to release them on a
timely basis, and to make sure that they are always updated to the latest production version. API software is sometimes
initiated without any noise or fanfare, but carefully nurtured by its true believers, then slipped into beta, then into
production, and then brought to the awareness of senior management after the API was demonstrated to be a success.
So in essence, API developers sometimes have to secretly develop for their business to be successful, and most times
they cannot be certain in any way if the API will ever succeed in the first place.
Overall, one of the greatest benefits of APIs is how much they can help with the integration of software services at
the core of a specific application. For example, think of software that runs behind a firewall or other similar piece of
hardware.
For all the positive benefits from so-called public APIs, the real revolution is that enterprises of all sizes are
API-enabling their back-end systems. This makes that organization permeable to partners but also to its own employees,
and is the number one reason why enterprises today are embracing APIs in droves.
APIs are at the very core in making internal system integration easy and harmonius, not just for developers but to
the end user as well.
At one time, the IT community looked to open source software to fill that function. Today, companies are working
closely together and in a tightlty-knit team approach in enabling internal software collaboration. But it turns out
that APIs prove to be an easier way to achieve similar goals.
Instead of just having to learn an entire code base, you just need a well-documented API to get access to software
services. And for the past ten years or so, Google and a few others such as Amazon have been leaders in that field, and
you can expect more of that.
In order to offer developers an efficient method to focus on services provided by some particular software, there
will have to be even more collaboration between them and the rest of the IT community if APIs are to become even more
popular than what they are now.
And this shift from open-source software to open APIs becomes ever more critical today as we move to cloud services, where application developers can no longer access the underlying
software. As the IT industry moves from software to IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) to PaaS (Platform as a Service),
APIs are the key to the shift.
But not just any APIs, however. The industry simply can't digest hundreds of thousands of competing APIs any more
than it could stomach a huge array of open-source projects for CMS, ERP, etc. We need APIs, but standardization, predictability
of functionality and seamless integration is required.
For example, take the OpenStack initiative. That open-source team has taken on the daunting task of unseating Amazon
Web Services, but it has made its life dramatically more difficult by trying to move the industry away from Amazon's APIs.
But for now, AWS APIs seem to be the public standard, at least as far as Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth is concerned.
"The funders and advocates of OpenStack, and any number of other cloud infrastructure projects both open source and proprietary,
would be better off figuring out how to leverage the AWS API standardization than trying to compete with it, simply because
no other API is likely to gain the sort of ecosystem we see around AWS today."
Shuttleworth is mostly right about OpenStack. It's better to rally around a common API, much as the IT industry has
rallied around Linux over the past 15 years or so. In the case of cloud computing, cloud expert and former Googler Sam
Johnston thinks the future is OpenCloud, and other industry observers have their own preferred flavors in the various
segments of the industry.
But at the heart of each cloud is APIs-- 'open' APIs that is. They are the new open source, except that they require
less access and less complexity to thousands of lines of code, and more programmatic interaction with software services. And
as an added bonus, open APIs don't come with the legal hassle of licensing fundamentalists.
Source: Linux News Today.
Add to
del.icio.us
Digg this
Get a great Ubuntu Linux dedicated server for less than $3 a day!
Share on Twitter
| 
