Restful APIs Predictions

Following the post that I wrote a few months ago (link) I wanted to do a small followup to see if my predictions are at least in the right direction.

2016 Restful API Predictions

Here is a small summary for about the predictions and insights for APIs taken from here.

  • It is going to be the The Internet of APIs and not Internet of Things
  • Move over IoT – 2016 is about the Internet of APIs
  • 14,377 APIs at end of 2015 and the number is increasing. 600% growth in APIs since 2010
  • Everything that matters will have an API and integrating best-of-breed micro-services is the best way.
  • The “Open Source” promise will be viewed differently.
  • We must embrace disruptive transformation and become a data-driven business empowered by big data and analytics.
  • Traditional IT becomes irrelevant and a new IT will be created.
  • API Management becomes [business] critical and Events become first-class citizens.
  • The API economy will drive the “opt-in” economy.

I my opinion that is emphasizes the importance of APIs in the future.
The Web is becoming programmable, we are starting to talk about consuming APIs. Each API will have thousands or millions of consumers, for this to become reality (in some cases it is already a reality) there are enterprise digital initiatives like SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and etc.

I also believe that the future of the APIs is with Events like WebHooks.
How this should work? The API will expose a list of events and consumers will do all the hard work:

  • Subscription
  • State Management (where am I up to?)
  • Retries

Cons

  • Very easy
  • Well-known pattern

Pros

  • Polling
  • High latency

In another view on the events, they can also be solved by Event Transports and I mean WebHooks, where Service POSTs events to subscribers. Here Publishers do all the hard work and there are some benefits when using this solution:

  • Not polling
  • Relatively lower latency

Although it does means that the Subscription management & guaranteed delivery must be done yourself and one of the bigger issues here: Reliability requires coordination between publisher & subscriber!

Conclusion

Well, it looks like the Restful API world is still evolving, still looking for the best tools to be used in order to manage the work on the API, publishing the API and the API usage.

RestCase is focusing on the Restful API development stage, starting for the API definition, automatic documentation, automatic testing and other great features that will help speed up development and make the API much more mature.

Guy Levin

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