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  • From Monolith to Multilith at ticketea

    ticketea is a large online ticket selling platform in Spain. This article describes their growing pains and how DevOps and an API-based distributed architecture allowed them to cope with growth, both from a technical (from monolith to multilith) and people (awareness and knowledge sharing) perspective.

  • Thinking Outside-In: How APIs Fulfill the Original Promise of Service-Oriented Architecture

    The article explores how and why APIs are a lightweight and agile way of building reusable business systems. While some SOA adopters delivered these goals many efforts faced complexity and failed. The key difference with APIs is in the shift from hierarchical services to distributed resources, simplicity, statelessness and a focus on making it practical for the business to understand and implement

  • Metadata-Driven Design: Building Web APIs for Dynamic Mobile Apps

    More than ten years ago, software architect Kevin Perera invented a design method for architectures that was called "metadata-driven design and development". In this article, Aaron Kendall explains how to use this design method and outlines similarities as well as differences to current techniques like RESTful services or HATEOAS by implementing a metadata-driven mobile application.

  • Programming with Semantic Profiles: In the Land of Magic Strings, the Profile-Aware is King

    As this article’s author, Mark Foster, puts it, "Absent profiles, the API space will be relegated to blindly passing around 'magic strings, fooling ourselves into thinking we are passing reliable semantic information." Here, Foster — one of the editors of the ALPS specification — explains what semantic profiles are and how they can transform the way Web APIs are desgined and implemented.

  • Profiles on the Web: An Interview with Erik Wilde

    Erik Wilde talks to Mike Amundsen about Profiles, Description, Documentation, Discovery, his Sedola project and the future of Web-level metadata for APIs.

  • The APIs.json Discovery Format: Potential Engine in the API Economy

    In the fast growing world of APIs and microservices, finding just the right API when you are developing a web, or mobile application, or possibly integrating between existing systems, is always a tedious task.

  • Managing Technology with CORE Strategy & Architectural C’s & P’s

    Suman Pradhan, who has worked in healthcare, financials and technology sectors, has written about developing the CORE (Consolidate, Optimize, Refresh and Enable) approach to helping architects and developers build sustainable solutions that match the business needs. In this article he discusses CORE and compares and contrasts with other software architectural techniques.

  • APIs with Swagger : An Interview with Reverb’s Tony Tam

    After a flurry of activity from thier open working group, Swagger 2.0 was officially released in September 2014. Our interview took place in March 2015, less than one year from the start of the 2.0 process and right after Reverb announced that the responsibliity for leading the future of the Swagger specification would be handed over to SmartBear, the Massachusetts-based software tools company.

  • The Power of RAML

    RAML, or the RESTful API Modeling Language, is a relatively new spec based on the YAML format- making it easily read by both humans and machines. But beyond creating a more easily understood spec, Uri Sarid, the creator of RAML, wanted to push beyond our current understandings and create a way to model our APIs before even writing one line of code.

  • Article Series: Description, Discovery, and Profiles : The Next Level in Web APIs

    This series focuses on three key areas of "meta-language" for Web APIs: API Description, API Discovery, and API Profiles. You’ll see articles covering all three of these important trends as well as interviews with some of the key personalities in this fast-moving space.

  • From Doodles to Delivery: An API Design Process

    Having a basic understanding of web based applications is a good foundation for designing a working Web API. But, if you want to create a good API you need a lot more than that. Designing a good API is hard work and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed when it’s your job to make one.

  • Description, Discovery, and Profiles: A Primer

    While the process of implementing Web APIs has become common, the tooling for describing, discovering, and understanding the meaning of the tens of thousands of API-based services has yet to settle into a widely-accepted set of standards. There is still quite a bit of opportunity when it comes to defining and implementing tools around the "meta-level" of APIs.

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