It was just over a decade ago that businesses were still wondering why it was necessary to have a Web site. Now it's a foregone conclusion that they are one of the most important touchpoints for any organization to possess. Fast forward to the last few years, and businesses are now -- in the same way they did with Web sites -- beginning to come to terms with the concept of the open API, and how it is turning out to be just as vital to the long-term success of their business.
For most of the past year, I have worked with two brilliant experts on APIs, Daniel Jacobson, at Netflix and Greg Brail, CTO of Apigee, to create a book that clearly explains the value of APIs. In researching the book, APIs: A Strategy Guide, we talked to dozens of other smart people who had led the creation of APIs for both internal and external use.One of the most striking findings was how often API programs were started in secret, nurtured by the true believers in a clandestine way, slipped into production, and then brought to the awareness of senior management after the API was shown to be a success.
”OAuth allows an application to act as an intermediary to services like Twitter – etcetera - on behalf of the end user,” he said. This type of token service for site hopping is a key mark of the Web 2.0 and the so-called ”App Economy” today. “We couldn’t have done this years ago,” said Ramji.
Apigee OAuth API: OAuth API is designed to make it easier to deal with OAuth by letting you quickly and easily authenticate across several APIs. It works by letting you delegate the OAuth dance to Apigee, then use a keychain and client libraries to invoke multiple APIs in a consistent way with less code. The OAuth API supports Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare and Salesforce's REST and Chatter APIs, with Java, Javascript and Objective C libraries.
As you may have guessed, GigaOm's Mobilize Conference is all about mobile devices and applications. But the real story here are the trends seen in the future of mobile. We've raced so quickly into our own future, via iPhones and tablets, that it can sometimes feel as though whatever's next is completely elusive. But as Mobilize's numerous talks have shown, the future is all about the repercussions of everyone having computers in their pockets.
Amazon Web Services was a game-changer for application developers. Suddenly, budding entrepreneurs no longer had to install and maintain their own servers--they could just plug into the Amazon system. That lowered costs and barriers to entry for many companies, and it helped foster the current tech boom. Today, AT&T is releasing a set of tools for developers that will help push that boom further.
What has dramatically accelerated the power of cloud-based apps and service platforms over the past two years is their embrace of Web services protocols. Using RESTful function calls with which developers are already familiar, they can request functionality from live, cloud-based servers that can deliver results in a form they can immediately put to use - HTML elements, or JSON or XML data.
Telefonica is illustrating how APIs, not websites, are the future form of e-commerce.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. and MADRID– BlueVia, the new developer global platform from Telefonica, and Apigee, the leading provider of API technology and services, today announced that the companies have partnered to integrate the Apigee API Console with BlueVia. With the interactive API Console, developers can now explore, learn, and test and the BlueVia APIs faster and more easily, finding and solving problems quickly, and share their results with others.
AT&T is hosting a series of "hackathons" this summer for app developers. The operator has tapped Apigee to provide developers with access to AT&T's network services, such as location, messaging, payment and speech. Applications with embedded APIs currently tap the AT&T network for service references to more than 2.5 billion times a month, says AT&T.
