When I first joined Stantive our development team was working on a set of APIs for OrchestraCMS. The sales team immediately asked why do APIs matter? What is the business driver behind APIs and why do we need them? At first I was surprised they asked me that. Since I’ve been a developer I had learned about and used APIs and thought why wouldn’t we have APIs. But I took a step back and thought about it from the perspective of a normal business user. It didn’t make as much sense, why build an API instead of building new functionality for all customers to use. I really had to think about how to explain what and API, why is that valuable and how does it get used.
1. What is an API?
API stands for Application Programming Interface. In human terms an API is a menu of items an application can do, and how to ask for those items. It provides a way to ask a application to do something and get a response. A good example of this is when people are interacting with APIs are travel sites. You ask a travel site for a list of flights, hotels and cars for a trip and it returns a list of a whole bunch of airlines, hotel chains, and car rental companies. The only way that travel site can provide that list is because each of those airlines, hotel chains, and car rental companies have provided APIs to their catalogs. The travel site can take your single request, go and ask all the companies for that same information and return it all back to you in a nice single list.
2. Why provide an API?
In the example above it means if you are an airline then people could see another airline has a cheaper flight and not choose you. You would rather have them come to your website and only see your flights so they didn’t see the cheaper flight without a lot of work. The problem with that is people don’t work that way. We like coming to a one stop shop to compare prices and get everything we need. If you didn’t provide that API then you wouldn’t show up on that site and you would lose out on all the business from that travel site. People would naturally find the cheapest flight and think if you weren’t there then you must be to expensive and not even go to look at your site. APIs provide value in that allows the information in one application to be shared with another. Be that an aggregator site like the travel site or an application like your email app you use on your phone.
3. How does an API get used?
There are many ways APIs get used. We’ve talked about a simple example where one site talks to another group of sites via APIs. APIs are also used in the applications we use day to day. For example take the app that you use to read your email on your phone. That app uses APIs in the backend to go out and talk to your email service to pull in all your emails into a single place. Or take news applications, those have to go back and talk to their parent companies site to pull down the news stories for you to read. The key with all of these is one application has to talk to another to get or share information with each other.
4. Why develop an API?
Because they allow conversations, they allow things to be created in one place and shared with anywhere, they allow for one hub of information gathered from many sources. Those applications that have an API allow things to be mixed and matched, connected in new ways. You no longer have to keep recreating the same stuff over and over.
Our team has worked very hard over the last year to develop a full, robust set of APIs that enable OrchestraCMS customers and partners to develop and deploy content across their digital channels - on the Salesforce platform and beyond. I can't wait to see what they do with what's coming next.