When I first started API Evangelist, I wanted to better understand the business of APIs, which really focused on API management. Over the course of four years, the list of companies delivering API management services has expanded with new entrants, an evolved with acquisitions of some of the major players. Visit my API management research site for more news, companies, tools and analysis from this part of API operations.
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API Management |
In 2011, people would always ask me, which API management company will help you with deployment? For a while, the answer was none of them, but this soon changed with new players emerging, and expanding of services from existing providers. To help me understand the expanding API lifecycle I started two new separate research areas:
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API Design |
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API Deployment |
Once you design, deploy your API, and you get a management plan in place, you have to start looking at how you are going to make money and get the word out. In an effort to better understand the business of APIs, I setup research sites for researching the monetizationand evangelizing of APIs:
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API Evangelism |
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API Monetization |
As the API space has matured, I started seeing that I would have to pay better attention to not just providing APIs, but also better track on the consumption of APIs. With this in mind I start looking into how APIs are discovered and what service and tools developers are using when integrating with APIs:
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API Discovery |
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API Integration |
While shifting my gaze to what developers are up to when building applications using APIs, I couldn’t help but notice the rapidly expanding world of backend as a service, often called BaaS:
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Backend as a Service (BaaS) |
As I watch the space, I carefully tag interesting news, companies, services and tools that have an API focus, or influence the API sector in any way. Four areas I think are the fastest growing, and hold the most potential are:
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Aggregation |
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Reciprocity |
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Real-Time |
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Voice |
In 2013, I saw also saw a conversation grow around an approach to designing APIs, called hypermedia. Last year things moved beyond just academic discussion around designing hypermedia APIs, to actual rubber meeting the road with companies deploying well designed hypermedia APIs. In January I decided that it was time to regularly track on what is going on in the hypermedia conversation:.
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Hypermedia APIs |
After that there are three areas that come up regularly in monitoring of the space, and pieces of the API puzzle that I don’t just think are important to API providers and consumers, they are areas I actively engage in:
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Embeddable |
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Scraping |
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Single Page Apps (SPA) |
There are other research projects I have going on, but these area reflect the core of my API monitoring and research. They each live as separate Github repositories, accessible through Github pages. I publish news, companies, tools, and my analysis on a regular basis. I use them for my own education, and I hope you can find useful as well.
