Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

March 2021

How APIs Can Support Enterprise IT Transformation

As stakeholders in more organizations look toward digital transformation strategies, they need to take a closer look at how to modernize their software. An overhaul of an IT system can be expensive and risky, even if the results pay off. What is not often examined however is the role of APIs in supporting enterprise IT transformation initiatives.

Would a Top-Down API Strategy Deliver Results for Your Organization?

There are many reasons why you should incorporate API management within your business strategy and why the development of a ‘top-down’ API strategy could benefit your organization. Vikas Anand (formerly of Oracle, now with Google) listed four enterprise benefits associated with effective of API management in an interview with CubeConversation: APIs also work to unify legacy systems with new technology, helping with the modernization of your software stack.

What is a Reusable API?

You don’t always need to generate a new API when you want to connect applications and other digital assets to your network. Instead, reusable APIs let you connect multiple applications and systems. As a result, you save time, improve functionality, and make information easier to track. During your application development process, you might think that you need to add innumerable APIs so your assets can communicate with each other.

New to APIs? Here's How To Start

As technology invades nearly every facet of our lives, businesses need to keep up. Digital transformation is a new normal for today’s business strategy, but you’ll need a solid foundation to work with. The solution to that is a solid application programming interface – or API for short. Did you know you can create an API in minutes without writing a line of code? Let DreamFactory show you how. Our 14-day free trial comes with a guided tour. Sign up today!

Introducing DreamFactory's MQTT Service

MQTT is a communication protocol for the publish-subscribe architecture. You can use DreamFactory as a MQTT client for your IoT projects. It’s easy to connect to any MQTT-based message broker using DreamFactory and easily publish and subscribe to any topic. DreamFactory’s MQTT client service is native to the platform, supporting role-based access controls, live API documentation, and more.

4 Excellent API Tools That Will Improve Your Integrations

Developers need excellent API tools that help them improve the quality of integrations and at the same time, reduce the time required to develop these integrations. Ideally, API tools should reduce the risk of integration and performance issues when developing new applications and should provide an effective means of accessing data that is often locked up in a variety of organisational databases.

Introduction to Unified Data: What Is It and Why Is It Important

Today’s businesses rely on data to operate. Everything from collecting customer data to recording data points from business processes contributes to reaching goals. Big data doesn’t mean much, though, when you keep it separated in silos. When you unify data, you create more data analytics opportunities that lead to valuable insights. Before you spend a lot of money on a robust ETL (extract, transform, load) solution that you don’t need, consider the benefits of API-led data unity.

Creating Read Only APIs with DreamFactory

As a best practice, you should take care to provide clients with the minimal API access privileges required to successfully complete their tasks. DreamFactory's role based access control manager ensures administrators never leave your data sources unnecessarily vulnerable, offering a point-and-click interface for quickly defining and reviewing privileges. In this video we'll walk through the configuration of a role-based access control, demonstrating how a client's API access privileges can be easily updated so as to allow only read access to a select set of API endpoints.

DreamFactory 4.5.2 - New Snowflake, Hadoop, and Hive Connectors

DreamFactory 4.5.2 has been released with improvements to our recently added Snowflake connector. In addition to Snowflake, version 4.5.0 introduced connectors for Apache Hive and Hadoop HDFS. All three were added by request of our customers, and we’re happy to see these new capabilities already being deployed into test environments.

SOAP vs REST: What's The Difference?

Developers, engineers, and anyone else looking to streamline development and decrease build times for integrations rely on APIs (application programming interface) to enable applications and databases to communicate. This inevitably leads to a comparison between SOAP and REST APIs, since they are two of the most common API paradigms. It can be quite difficult to understand where SOAP and REST methods are best suited, what their specific differences are and why developers prefer one method over the other.

Comprehensive API Management Platforms: Who Has The Most Features?

Developers often create many small API tools that can improve functionality, creation, tests, and management. For many organizations though, a comprehensive API management platform that consolidates many features into a single, unified solution presents an attractive alternative. If you don’t want to bother with managing a suite of small, disparate tools, you could be interested in understanding more about the following API platforms that provide an exhaustive set of features.

Do I Need an API Led Strategy?

Whether or not you plan for it, APIs are becoming a critical aspect of your business’s functionality. The Wall Street Journal reports that 10 percent of businesses already use more than 200 apps. You cannot stop your employees from adopting apps that help them do their jobs. Instead, you should lead them by developing a digital strategy that helps monitor KPIs, reviews API adoption, and follows a planned roadmap to reach business goals.