Last week, CA Technologies has announced several new products in their API Management portfolio. The announcement was made during their annual CA World event, which took place November 16-20 in Las Vegas. This year, the key topic of the event has been Application Economy, so it is completely unsurprising that API management was a big part of the program. After all, APIs are one of the key technologies that drive the “digital transformation”, helping companies to stay agile and competitive, enable new business models and open up new communication channels with partners and customers.
Whether the companies are leveraging APIs to accelerate their internal application development, expose their business competence to new markets or to adopt new technologies like software-defined computing infrastructures, they are facing a lot of complex challenges and have to rely on third-party solutions to manage their APIs. The API Management market, despite its relatively young age, has matured quickly, and CA Technologies has become one of the leading players there. In fact, just a few months ago KuppingerCole has recognized CA as the overall leader in the Leadership Compass on API Security Management.
However, even a broad range of available solutions for publishing, securing, monitoring or monetizing APIs does not change the fact that before a backend service can be exposed as an API, it has to be implemented – that is, a team of skilled software developers is still required to bring your corporate data or intelligence into the API economy. Although quite a number of approaches exist to make the developer’s job as easy and efficient as possible (sometimes even eliminating the need for a standalone backend, like the AWS Lambda service), business persons are still unable to participate in this process on their own.
Well, apparently, CA is going to change that. The new CA Live API Creator is a solution that’s aiming at eliminating programming from the process of creating data-driven APIs. For a lot of companies, joining the API economy means the need to unlock their existing data stores and make their enterprise data available for consumption through standard APIs. For these use cases, CA offers a complete solution to create REST endpoints that expose data from multiple SQL and NoSQL data sources using a declarative data model and a graphical point-and-click interface. By eliminating the need to write code or SQL statements manually, the company claims tenfold time-to-market improvement and 40 times more concise logic rules. Most importantly, however, business persons no longer need to involve software developers – the process seems to be easy and straightforward enough for them to manage on their own.
For more advanced scenarios, these APIs can be extended with declarative business rules, JavaScript event processing and fine-grained access control. Naturally, the product can also integrate with other products from CA’s API Management portfolio. The whole solution can be flexibly deployed as a virtual appliance, software in various app servers or directly in the cloud.
CA Live API Creator consists of three components:
- Database Explorer, which provides interactive access to the enterprise data across SQL and NoSQL data sources directly from a browser. With this tool, users can not just browse and search, but also manage this information and even create “back office apps” with graphical forms for editing the data across multiple tables.
- API Creator, the actual tool for creating data-driven APIs using a point-and-click GUI. It provides the means for designing data models, defining logical rules, managing access control and so on, all without the need to write application code or SQL statements. It’s worth stressing that it’s not a GUI-based code generator – the solution is based on an object model, which is directly deployed to the API server.
- The aforementioned API Server is responsible for execution of APIs, event processing and other runtime logic. It connects to the existing data sources and serves client requests to REST-based API endpoints.
Although the product hasn’t been released yet (will become available in December), and although it should be clearly understood that it’s by nature not an universal solution for all possible API use cases, we can already see a lot of potential. The very idea of eliminating software developers from the API publishing process is pretty groundbreaking, and if CA delivers on their promises to make the tool easy enough for business people, it will become a valuable addition to the company’s already first-class API management portfolio.