I open up my Thursdays to briefings, calls, demos and other phone, skype, and hangout related activities. This morning I received a walk-through of the JustAPIs platform from AnyPresence, taking my thoughts in a much different direction than in my conversation with Wavemaker, which was at the intersection of API design and API gateway in this new cloud-based, single page application design studio.
JustAPIs is a downloadable, installable, portable, little API design, deployment, and management engine, which you can install on Linux, Windows, Mac, and even your Raspberry Pi. This represent the functionality I have in mind, when I think about the future of what is an API gateway--a little node that can put ANYWHERE to serve up, proxy, and manage my APis.
I downloaded JustAPis, ran at localhost, and begin mapping it to a handful of my remote APIs, and crafting a couple simple APIs to understand what is possible. Its obvious there is still a lot of work to be done, as the whole management side of JustAPIs is under construction, but I like what I see so far. I like the micro gateway characteristic. I think it has potential in not just the API economy, but specifically in the mobile, and IoT layers of the API economy.
As with my Wavemaker discussion today, there are aspects of JustAPIs I'd like to see a become a reaility, in the realm of hypermedia, discovery with APIs.json, and portability, and interoperability using API definitions like Swagger and API Blueprint, but it is a great start. JustAPIs is a significant movement forward in the evolution my perception of just what is an API gateway, and after talking with the JustAPIs team, I am confident that because of the extensibility available in the solution, it will become a ubiquitous layer of the API economy.
JustAPIs dovetails nicely with other movements I'm watching in the API space around containerization, and software defined networking. When you have a lightweight gateway that you can launch anywhere, with the ability to launch existing API blueprints, as well as allow extensibility by other API driven services--the landscape will begin to shift quickly.
I have a number of other stories, derived from my conversation with JustAPIs today, but I will save them for the future. I will keep playing with, and exploring the JustAPIs engine. Todays conversation with Wavemaker and JustAPIs has done wonders for my API gateway perspective, at a time where I'm open to possibilities, and determined to move the conversation forward.
