The dream of easily reusable components is an old one in programming dating back to the emergence of object oriented programming in the 1960s. The truth is it never really worked. Not in a way that transformed programming.
Today the number of APIs available to developers has exploded. Those provide critical connective tissue and increasingly important functionality which is fundamentally changing the dynamics of how software is created and brought to market.
However putting your API out there for the public to find and use, is not enough anymore. That act of assembling the components into a new whole though, still happens largely through exactly the kind of programming we have always done. 70% of APIs integration and usage will happen outside of IT Development, by average business users, like marketers or accountants. We must think about consumption.
Based on the experience of integrating to hundreds of APIs, this session will provide tips for optimizing APIs for the integration use case. So what are the minimum requirements for a modern API to fit into this landscape that product managers have to keep in mind? What are the tools out there that are enabling this API-glue approach?
We are not quite there, but the future in which most people will be empowered to build software is arriving and APIs are the key enablers for this.
