Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

APIs have come a long way from the arcane geek-speak of software interfaces popularized by Win32 APIs (still among the most commonly searched API phrases). Today, APIs represent interfaces between businesses and large swaths of internal enterprise services and business units. APIs not only connect software to software but also help to create entire commercial ecosystems, and so have become integral parts of how enterprises conduct business.

Good API design separates APIs that merely expose assets from those that help developers get things done. As I’ve written before, and as we’ll explore in this article, good design includes the style in which web API URLs are constructed.

In recent years, APIs have encouraged the emergence of new services by facilitating collaboration between applications and databases of one or more companies. Beyond catalyzing innovation, APIs have also revolutionized the customer-company relationship, allowing it to provide an accurate and detailed picture of the consumer at a time when a quality customer experience now counts as much as the price or capabilities of the product.

API Fortress is a continuous testing platform for APIs. We’ve been a friend to Kong since the beginning. In this guest blog post, we explain how our company uses Kong to facilitate the process of virtualizing APIs.

Whether in the tech press or analyst reports, it became more common in 2018 to see the words “API” and “security”—or worse, “API” and “breach”—together in the same headline. APIs are not only the connective tissue between applications, systems, and data, but also the mechanisms that allow developers to leverage and reuse these digital assets for new purposes.