#DefragCon 2013 Notes: APIs In a Post-API World – Uri Sarid, Mulesoft

1 minute read

APIs In a Post-API World – Uri Sarid, Mulesoft

  • Mashups in 2005 – mostly about Google Maps, not much else was available
  • Now we have a huge number of APIs available
  • > 13,000 open APIs today, perhaps millions of enterprise APIs
  • “Integration is the opposite of sexy. Until you call it ‘connectivity'”
  • The new software stack is layered with APIs, orchestration, then more APIs – each with a different spin that we all may need
  • Key: delight your users
  • How? Your API needs to be designed up-front for the people that will use it
  • Iterate, obtain feedback, model cleanly and consistently, engage
  • UI needs UX; API needs APX
  • RAML – RESTful API Modeling Language
  • RAML allows for describing APIs in a simple way, to stop talking about it and start talking about what is behind it
  • RAML is desktop publishing for APIs, allowing them to be described while reusing model definitions to keep the definition short
  • API notebooks allow you to describe API use cases from RAML using Github gists
  • The goal is to get beyond the API to the layers of value
  • Open Government and Intuit are forming the groundwork for this
    • For now, they are read-only but it will get more interesting once they work out the security and open it up for read/write