Following up on its acquisition of the FeedHenry backend-as-a-service (BaaS) platform last year, Red Hat has outlined a mobile computing strategy under which it will unify FeedHenry with its existing application server and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings.
Cathal McGloin, vice president of mobile platforms for FeedHenry at Red Hat, says organizations will be able to take a more platform-centric approach to extending the reach of the enterprise into multiple mobile computing applications.
One of the major issues that organizations face today is that many mobile computing applications are built in isolation. Instead of being able to reuse a variety of existing backend services, they often wind up writing code that replicates a function or a service that already exists somewhere else in the enterprise.
McGloin says Red Hat, via REST APIs, intends to make it simpler to discover and then invoke those services via FeedHenry and JBoss application servers and the OpenShift PaaS environment.
Most IT organizations, notes McGloin, have already made massive investments in technologies such as enterprise service busses (ESBs). It’s not likely that many of them will be ripping out and replacing those technologies any time soon. They do, however, want to leverage those investments by modernizing the technologies in a way that exposes RESTful APIs to mobile application developers.
REST APIs are clearly emerging as a de facto integration standard across the enterprise. The only real issue at this point is not whether to use them, but rather to what degree they might replace all the other integration interfaces.