If you're responsible for building, deploying, operating and optimizing API Infrastructure, you already know - building applications, exposing data, and managing an ecosystem is an expensive, time-consuming process. These projects require the integration of multiple teams and development lifecycles stretching across organizational boundaries, so you have to get buy-in and effort across the enterprise, and months of coordinated work to deliver new applications.
Say you want to build a set of APIs to expose some existing data to a new web or mobile app that’s being built. This is often done on an ad hoc basis, with many dependencies essentially limiting the flexibility and capability of what you can provide. Where the APIs live and what they connect to are entirely dependent on what’s already in place, so every application backend might need to be built on a different OS, data source, or programming language.
After you set up the infrastructure, you start coding. Your teams write a bunch of custom SQL to fit the database for this particular project and a bunch of code to map incoming API requests to the limited parameters exposed in the SQL statements or stored procedures. Then you need hundreds of lines of code to take the app’s business requirements and build logic, server-side functions specific to that app, data access management based on the user’s role, dependency management, error handling, etc. More code and hours of time defining the API interface, building documentation, and maybe adding in one or two features like pagination or filtering so it doesn’t immediately crash – whatever you find the time and money for.
Then you have to repeat the process for every new data source, every new API, and every new set of user roles and permissions. For each subsequent release you have to go in, write more code, figure out where to put it, and then recompile, redeploy and re-test the entire thing, just in case you introduced any behavioral changes – a maintenance nightmare. And when it comes time to build the next application or set of APIs, the process starts all over.
CA feels your pain - and today, we're delivering a solution. CA Live API Creator enables you to instantly create enterprise-class APIs for data resources. Using a browser-based UI, you connect to your data sources, pull in some tables, point-and-click to customize the look and feel of your API, and define the logical relationships between important data fields using simple human-readable rules. CA Live API Creator automatically creates a rock solid, consistent API with all of the features an enterprise would expect out-of-the-box. And it does it all instantly. No SQL. No hundreds of lines of code. No compile. No deploy. No maintenance nightmares.
And yes, it's real. You can learn more at http://ca.com/createapis. We're pretty excited about CA Live API Creator and how it can help - and we look forward to answering any questions you might have.