There are numerous companies, with existing IT infrastructure, who are looking to deploy APIs in 2013. These companies will be deploying APIs using their existing technology teams, or depending on one of the 17 API management service providers available.
This market is ripe for the 3Scale's of the world to provide valuable services to, but for many companies, organizations and government agencies who need to deploy APIs this year, API deployment will be about taking an existing database or multiple databases, and open them up to the public, partners, 3rd party developers or possibly just provide access to a remote department or branch of their company in the easiest way possible.
Not all companies will have the resources, or the need to deploy full blown API programs. They just need a dead simple database to API solution that will quickly expose their data over the web in a secure way. Until recently this solution wasn’t available in the cloud, but a new API service provider called Emergent One has stepped up to fill in the gap.
Emergent One is a cloud service that allows you to connect to your company's MySQL, PostgreSQL or Amazon RDS databases, then generate a REST API from your existing data stores.
Using Emergent One you can define a new API, connect to your database using an agent or direct connection, then define your API resources complete with meta data, sub-resources, in-line resources, fields and computed fields. Pretty much all you will need to make a clean web API from a database.
Once you have your API resources defined, Emergent One provides you with a developer portal around these APIs, and the ability to provide developer registration, then issue keys they can use to access your data--providing the openness you desire, while keeping things secure and within your control.
The developer portal is complete with documentation, explorer console and code libraries for iOS, Android and in Ruby. Emergent One allows you to bind your own DNS to your endpoints, and also provide paid plans, complete with billing management.
Emergent One is a perfect service for any company looking to develop and manage APIs from your local databases. The only thing I would say is missing is support tools, to help you interact with your developers after you launch your API. But I'm sure its coming.
I’m happy to see the Emergent One platform has a freemium tier giving you up to 5,000 API requests a month, a business tier for up to 2.5M requests a month, as well as an enterprise tier with sales support for all levels of needs. The freemium tier will be critical for businesses to play with, and get to know better.
The Emergent One admin needs a little polishing, it could use a more dashboard like feel for the home page, but overall the Emergent One team nails it! Providing dead simple, yet robust API deployment from your MySQL, PostgreSQL and Amazon RDS databases, in a way that anyone can put to use.
If your company is looking to deploy and API using a database, and don’t have the resources internally to make it happen, I definitely recommend taking a look at Emergent One.
