Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

The API economy is growing rapidly. According to research by Coleman Parkes enterprises were twice as likely as their peers to be confident they are differentiating themselves by using Application Programming Interfaces. The same report showed that companies with advanced API management processes experience up to 47 percent better business results than those with basic API management.

In this episode of Kongcast, I went all-in on PHP, Laravel and PHP developer tools with Freek Van der Herten, a backend developer at Spatie. Then, Freek demoed his new PHP debugging tool: Ray. Check out the transcript and video from our conversation below, and be sure to subscribe to get email alerts for the latest new episodes.

GraphQL is a flexible, strongly-typed query language. It's useful because it gives front-end developers the ability to query the database without many changes to the back-end. In this article, David Sanchez shows us how to design and build our own GraphQL APIs in Rails.

Businesses of all sizes are increasingly relying on APIs to create competitive advantages, but many don't know the difference between API Management and API Gateways. This article will discuss what each solution does, how they can be used in conjunction with one another, and why it's essential to use both services when building an API strategy.

Like many developers and operations professionals, you may have had complicated experiences with security and certificates (encryption of the connection and authentication). Maybe so much so that you try to avoid working on them whenever possible. If you’re looking for a simpler way, Kong may be the answer. As with everything with Kong, the idea is to make things as lightweight as possible, including the complexity of setting up and maintaining certificate-based security.

There is hardly an IT application nowadays that doesn’t provide an API, which specifies how this application should interact with the rest of the IT ecosystem. So, it’s no wonder that IT staff even at large enterprises increasingly make use of APIs when they need to integrate multiple systems with each other, commonly new SaaS applications with the existing IT estate. At the same time, there are APIs and then there are APIs.

The world of insurance has been one most heavily influenced by APIs and the API-first operating model. Today, insurance agencies can benefit from learning how the API-first operating model can enable your IT team to unlock data from legacy systems and more. Technology has left its imprint on the insurance industry, and now tools like APIs have created even more opportunities for success. With so much room for success, it is important to realizes the need for insurance transformation.

Certain products can benefit from having real-time charts displayed within them. Whether it is an internal or external application, metrics truly come to life when they are displayed nicely. In the past, to display such graphics you would need to implement your own charting tool, map the data or metrics into the tool, and then maintain this implementation. Overall, it was a very inefficient and cumbersome way to display data visually within your applications.

One of the most important phrases of DevOps practices is “Test early, test often.” It’s crucial to perform functional testing early with unit tests and integration tests. But it’s equally important to perform non-functional testing. That means you should have performance tests. As markets become more saturated with each passing day, you no longer have the luxury to postpone performance testing until all features are developed.