Seven Enterprise Applications Trends for High Growth Companies
It’s about to become a lot simpler to tap into the emerging API economy thanks to a new open source modeling language from MuleSoft. The challenge with building APIs is that not only do they tend to easily break, but inconsistencies in implementation wind up exposing more data than intended.
Announced this week, the RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML) solves that problem by making it easier to build robust APIs and then store them in a library that developers can easily access and implement.
According to MuleSoft CTO Uri Sarid, RAML should lead to a lot more consistency in how RESTful APIs are developed. For various reasons, there can be several variations of the same APIs. Over time, Sarid says there are about 13,000 public APIs, all of which should be easily discoverable. In addition to MuleSoft, contributors to RAML include Box, Intuit, PayPal and AngularJS.
RAML is a language that MuleSoft is providing modeling tools that guide developers through the process of creating a robust API, identifying API patterns and exploring and testing an API.
Available for free via APIhub or RAML.org, Sarid says the goal is to make the API economy flourish by making it simpler to work with APIs, all of which Sarid says MuleSoft expects will increase demand for its integration software.
As APIs continue to mature, they will extend many of the service-oriented architectures (SOA) that are commonly found in the enterprise today in ways that most organizations never imagined. While those efforts may not always be elegant, they do represent a significant step toward making IT an integral foundation for building a truly digital business.
