Future API in 2014

2013 was marked by impressive achievements in the development of API technology , as well as in its popularization and investment in this area. The number of APIs listed in ProgrammableWeb exceeded 10,000 for the first time, there were serious cash injections and acquisitions associated with this technology, many new conferences were organized, including our own conference, Strategy and Practice API , held in conjunction with the Evangelist API . 2013 was also marked by new initiatives, such as API Commons , in which participants are trying to solve the long-term tasks of various sectors of the economy.

The number of active user APIs that we support as part of our API management platform has doubled over the past year - and API traffic has just increased. Therefore, after such an impressive 2013, we asked ourselves a question: what does the new 2014 prepare for us? And here are our predictions!

1. (As one would expect) API growth: an obvious first forecast, according to which many new APIs will appear in 2014 — all indicators show that their number will only increase. The number of public APIs noted in the well-known lists has just reached 10,000, and there are still a huge number of private or semi-public APIs, the number of which is significantly superior to the public APIs. These private APIs include interfaces belonging to rapidly developing categories, including a mobile backend; API for SAAS integration; An API that replaces the integration of "heavyweight" B2B solutions and even an API for home electronics hardware like Philips Hue lightbulb.

In 2014, we expect that the number of public and private APIs created within these areas will grow from 100,000 to 200,000 - we have already approached the lower limit of this number, according to estimates, according to which the ratio of private APIs to public ones is 9: one. We expect that the growth of the API will occur in two directions: first, new APIs will come out (as indicators of such growth, we note hundreds of new registrations and dozens of launched APIs every month), secondly, the availability of multiple private APIs, as companies seek to reach a significantly wider audience.
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2. Expansion of common API use options: second, and probably the most important — along with an increase in the number of API — the assumption is associated with an increase in the number of types of companies launching an API release — now there are sports equipment manufacturers, retailers, manufacturers of high-tech equipment, construction companies, government and charitable organizations and representatives of almost every sector of the economy. We believe that this trend will also continue its development. In a study for our recently published e-book on the economics of API, we described five key API use cases starting with mobile platform capabilities and ending with business transaction acceleration, and all five types of API values ​​seem to be interrelated - and can be applied in any sector of the economy.

3. The key issue in 2014 will be the API copyright issue: with the resumption of the copyright case between Oracle and Google Java, the premonition of the future tightening of requirements for API specifications has returned to us, and the case, if the current decision is declared invalid, can have far-reaching consequences - to the extent that certain interface patterns will be copyrighted against reuse. Although in some cases such protection may be justified, the application of copyright to the API may have a negative effect on the development of innovations, since it will “successfully” protect widely used and important patterns from use by third-party companies. Initiatives such as API Commons can help build the basis for reusable patterns — but such projects are in the early stages of development, so copyright disputes will be an important part of 2014.

4. The focus will be on service description technologies: one of the key challenges for the REST API is that API providers almost never publish allocated and relocatable metadata about their APIs that can be found and processed. Although some emerging formats like WADL and Swagger are currently available, and new formats like Blueprint and RAML, they solve the problem at best partially and are not common. This lack of automated descriptions hinders the entire process of working with the API, starting with the generation of stub libraries and ending with finding the API — for example, the search engine API is unlikely to appear before the publication of such electronic descriptions becomes the norm.

As a result, we expect the emergence of debates related to industry and best practices, which formats to borrow, and the emergence of agreements on how to publish / find them. Without this, it is probably impossible to organize public platforms for APIs, such as ProgrammableWeb .

5. New API aggregators will appear: as the number of APIs grows , middle-level projects appear, such as Segment.IO , Zypr and others, which allow combining several APIs of one specific segment into a single addressable API. An aggregator of this type creates a single point of integration for several backend APIs. In some cases, the solutions offered by the aggregators may seem unreliable due to the API features that they combine, but in other cases they are expected with open arms, because aggregator solutions reduce the complexity of the project for developers and reduce the cost of direct support. With the increase in the number of APIs, the number of areas in which aggregators will appear will grow. The pace of use of the API is ahead of the speed of their creation, which in combination leads to the next forecast ...

6. API development tools will be actively developed: today, many API development tools from various vendors, such as we, Mashery, Apigee and others, are focused on providing API owners with the opportunity to provide their API to third parties. This is an important technology that is now used everywhere. However, until recently, there were relatively few tools for API “consumers” - in particular, for developers to debug, monitor and track the use of the API within their applications. In 2013, several companies appeared to solve this problem - among them such companies as Runscope and API Science . More similar organizations will appear this year - including a new offer from 3scale. Innovations for developers using APIs have become extremely important, because nowadays even developers using well-documented APIs have difficulties and frustrations on their way to their goal.

7. Single Page Application will become a new engine for API development: Single Page Application Architectures (or SPA) architecture for web applications written in HTML, the implementation of which has become possible with the advent of HTML5, is currently undergoing significant growth. The SPA concept involves using HTML, CSS3 and Javascript to create an application that works by uploading a single HTML page to a web browser and then performing all the functions embedded in the application through API requests to the backend server — in such an application you don’t go to new web pages. We have already written about the influence of this technology on the API [ 1 , 2 ] and we are witnessing the development of this trend. In particular, such Javascript frameworks as Angular.js are starting to gain popularity, development tools are evolving, and new frameworks, such as Famo.us , make the JS development process extremely attractive for the Web.

As a result, we expect that the SPA architecture will start becoming the norm for business applications / functional applications in 2014 and will gradually be used also in e-commerce and retail.

8. APIs for hypermedia will increase in popularity: APIs that work with hypermedia are more flexible than traditional ones, since the responses returned to requests for such APIs contain certain “allowed” actions (this process is described in more detail here ), providing the API dynamically change the content of requests and thereby adapt to the current situation. However, now those who prefer hypermedia APIs, APIs that use static URLs still have to make compromises, although at present, large-scale deployment of this technology is observed in APIs from the Public Media Platform and the recently released Amazon's Appstream API .

It will take time for this technology to take root, but in 2014 we expect to see more bright options for its use and more tools aimed at popularizing it.

9. APIs that work with civilian institutions will be a breakthrough of the year: in an attempt to predict which categories of APIs will grow faster than others, we kept returning to APIs that use information from civilian institutions. The management of large cities, such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Helsinki, has already made large amounts of data available, so now is the time for an API to provide urban infrastructure data to citizens. And the townspeople, in turn, will be able to create applications and mashups based on them, visualize the information received. This trend is becoming more and more popular - especially due to the fact that state institutions are prohibitively expensive to create all web and mobile applications that are needed by citizens: thus, access to such information opens up a new direction for innovation and opportunities for urban residents. help ourselves. Another reason for the growing popularity of this area is that initiatives like open311 , CitySDK and CityProtocol are actively trying to standardize some of these interfaces for a large number of cities, which should speed up technology adaptation and at the same time expand the consumption markets of applications using similar data.

10. Native web technologies such as openAuth, JSON and others will continue to grow and develop: in 2012-13, XML began to lose its popularity in terms of supporting public APIs - JSON became an upward trend in this direction. There have even been cases when companies that previously worked with XML have stopped supporting this technology. This trend was also characteristic of 2013, marked by the emergence of many new APIs, focused primarily on JSON and, to a much lesser extent, on XML. This trend, along with the popularization of other web-based standards, is likely to remain valid in 2014, given that mobile and HTML5 + Javascript has a positive effect on the growth in the number of APIs. Even where APIs are used primarily for B2B integration (previously the former SOAP / XML prerogative), mobile scenarios are actively considered as additional options that influence the choice of the final technology accordingly.

So, 2014 opens up exciting prospects for us and, without a doubt, is preparing a lot of surprises! We look forward to the opportunity to confirm or refute their assumptions, as well as to learn about something new and unexpected.

[Fabernovel, in turn, is working on practical seminars in this area, and if your company has an understanding that moving towards working with the API is necessary and promising, the first step may be to participate in such a seminar and work with our experts ... This , in many ways, a unique offer, so if you are interested, write to us.]