API Infrastructure provider 3Scale has moved beyond just API management, with a launch of a new API integration service called APITools. 3Scale, one of the original API management providers, is moving out of just providing tools for API providers, and now targeting developers who are depending on API services for their web and mobile applications—catering to both sides of the API infrastructure coin.
As developers depend on more API driven resources for their web and applications, the need to be in tune with the inner workings of an API is increasing. We don't just need access to the results of an API anymore, we need to understand the composition, performance and overall availability of the web APIs we depend on. The number of tools and services dedicated to assisting developers with API Integration is one of the fastest growing API areas, right along with API design.
Getting In Front Of The APIs You Depend On
APITools allows you to add all the APIs you depend on, whether they are public APIs like Twitter and LinkedIn, or the homegrown services of your own company and your partners. Once connected, APITools does all the work to profile communication with APIs, and how applications are consuming them.
Establish Middleware Between Your Apps and APIs
Without API integration tools, the inside of API calls are a black box. APITools doesn't just profile API transactions, it allows you to establish a middleware platform between your apps and the API they depend on. This middleware allows you to transform and inject elements into API transactions, allowing you to not just understand API operations, but force them to execute as you desire.
Evolved Awareness Of How Your APIs Operate
Once web API services are connected with APITools, and the middleware configured, the learning begins via a visual dashboard, providing you with intelligence on all API operations. This awareness of API operations can become real-time, with notifications of API events, staying in tune with operations beyond the dashboard—shining a real-time light on what used to be a black box.
API integration services like APITools will do for developers, what API management tools have done for API providers. Before there were API infrastructure tools like 3Scale, API providers had very little insight into how APIs were being consumed, and API management services work to provide valuable insight into how they are truly being consume. As developers depend on more APIs, they need insight into how APIs perform, and the bottlenecks and errors that impact their applications—providing a much needed awareness, which is essential to successful applications.
Its nothing new for API infrastructure providers to deliver services for both API providers and consumers, but APITools from 3Scale represents the maturing of the API integration space, and both sides of the API coin needing control, and insight into API operations. APIs aren't just hobby mashups anymore, and we need tools that help us ensure a higher quality of service across our APIs, and applications that depend on them.
Disclosure: 3Scale is an API Evangelist partner.
