#Swagger

Competitive pressures and tighter timeframes are pushing businesses to provide more personalized content and capabilities to a targeted audience. To keep up with market demand and customer expectations, modern web apps often make use of APIs on the front-end for connecting client-facing applications to back-end systems and their data services. The back-end systems are also frequently assembled from interconnected microservices, wired together by APIs.

With proper technology, an API-centric architecture can dramatically simplify the software stack, letting developers piece together features and capabilities like re-usable building blocks. Providing flexible API options also ensures a robust end-user experience, allowing applications to scale instantly without much care about the nuts and bolts of back-end systems.

StreamScape provides several options for exposing services as API:

• User-defined Custom API
  A native way for exposing data engine resources as RESTful API that lets users define their own rules for mapping between URL fragments and data objects on-the-fly.

• Open API Standard (Swagger)
  A powerful, standards-based way of defining RESTful API with a large ecosystem of
  tools and developers supporting most programming languages, iPhone and Android.

• OData (Open Data Protocol)
  An OASIS standard for creation of queryable data services with extensive REST-based query syntax, a growing ecosystem of vendors and strong backing from Microsoft.

The Reactive Data Platform™ helps businesses capitalize on the value of an API-centric architecture and accelerates web application development, providing powerful built-in capabilities for code-free API definition and critical DevOps tools for API governance and security.

APIs have become a foundational technology for development of robust and scalable enterprise applications. In recent years the primary goals of system architecture shifted from integration to interface-centric design. The main reasons for the change being agility and ease of use.

An API-centric architecture accelerates implementation and future-proofs applications for new front-end technologies by separating data access from user interface design. APIs provide standard, language-agnostic interfaces that let developers discover and understand system capabilities without access to source code or documentation.

This makes it easy for tools, systems and devices to access back-end functionality. As result, new consumer applications can be developed much faster, deployed at scale and easily connected to other applications and systems, eliminating the need for any specialized integration technologies.

Furthermore, standards based interfaces allow system owners to expose data on-demand, in a structured way based on application needs. This is a much more flexible and cost effective approach to data preparation, potentially making traditional prep methods like ETL obsolete.