Apigee is a cloud based service built on top of Sonoa technology for API gateway, offering testing, debugging, analytics and security for your API (See our past coverage of Apigee and Sonoa Systems here). It sits between your application and your API and offers the above mentioned services. What Apigee does to your API is that it creates a low-latency proxy that is able to filter, stream, re-route, and record all traffic to the API in real time.During the Chirp conference, Apigee teamed up with Twitter to offer Apigee console for Twitter. With the console, developers of all levels, from absolute beginners to advanced ones, can use the Apigee console to learn, experiment, test, or explore the Twitter API. API documentation could become pretty big and, at times, confusing. Especially with a service like Twitter, it could be a very daunting exercise. Apigee’s mission is to simplify the whole process. Now developers can use Apigee’s console and completely understand the complex Twitter API with a few clicks. It is possible to explore the Twitter API with or without authentication (including OAuth). On top of simplifying the Twitter API, Apigee’s console also offer a much higher access rate to developers than what they can get by directly accessing the Twitter API.
When I spoke to Sam Ramji of Apigee sometime back, I asked him if they are planning to extend this to other social networking apps. He said they are looking into expanding the console to support other applications. Today, they are announcing the support for Facebook in the Apigee API console. Now their console will allow Facebook developers to learn, test, debug and interact with the Facebook Open Graph API more efficiently and productively. Apigee now makes it easier than ever for Facebook developers to learn the structure of the API, view requests and responses, build applications more quickly and detect and dig into problems. This easy to use web app, with auto complete feature for APIs (much like what Firefox does for URLs), allows an easy exploration of the complete surface area of the open graph API. It also supports OAuth. Plus, the console also supports some of the unique features offered by the Open Graph API.
The most interesting feature about these tools is the ability to take a snapshot of a response during debugging and sharing it with other developers for troubleshooting. This unique social feature makes the app development for these social networks using Apigee much more productive. Check out this video for more information on their console for Facebook API.
The Apigee tool for developers is a pretty interesting concept and greatly simplifies the life of Twitter and Facebook app developers. Integration with PaaS providers like Heroku makes it easy for even novice developers to easily build apps on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. If you are a developer planning to touch API of any web based service, you should definitely check out Apigee.
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