MuleSoft, the integration platform for both SaaS and on-premise applications, is today announcing the launch of APIhub, a public repository and community resource for API discovery. The idea of the hub is to give both application developers, and enterprise customers the ability to find and use a wide selection of APIs and also the documentation for those individual APIs. APIhub exposes the existing APIs from MuleSofts intergation product, Anypoint alongside the APIs from other providers. It’s kind of an information hub to focus developers on the use of APIs. APIhub offers:

  • A catalog of APIs, both open and closed
  • An ontologyfor browsing APIs by category, as well as search capabilities
  • Documentation and testing capabilities; for example, allowing developers to pass parameters to the API using the Web-based console, with real-time visibility into the results
  • Community content, including discussion forums, tips and tricks, ratings, code samples and client libraries
  • Capabilities to follow APIs and be notified about version updates and changes that impact applications

Essentially a one stop shop for the consumption of APIs. On the other side of the house, Mulesoft believes the platform will be valuable to API providers by offering:

  • A platform for driving discovery and adoption of APIs, including features for publishing the descriptive profile, detailed specifications and technical documentation
  • Simple import and transformation from various API specification formats to the standardized APIhub format for easy consumption
  • Platform capabilities for simple creation of interactive documentation
  • Infrastructure for driving community engagement, including user ratings, comments and code samples

I get the value of an API library and central repository, but I question whether it is best placed in the hands of a company that derives commercial benefit from the integration of applications using those APIs. It seems to me that the APIhub is intended primarily to drive revenue for Mulesoft’s integration and API management solutions and, as such, is somewhat conflicted given the very community-minded messaging around the launch. It’s also important to note that the Programmable Web, the API hub founded by John Musser provides this service too, although I’ll admit that the acquisition of Programmable Web by Alcatel Lucent and it’s API arm somewhat introduced similar conflicts to the relationship between the hub and API users.

APIs are unquestionably the lingua franca for gluing together disparate services and applications and APIs will only continue to rise both in number and consumption levels (see the graph above, appropriately published by programmable Web). As APIs grow in importance however it is critical that we ensure the commercialization of those APIs, and the services around them is open and honest. While APIhub is undoubtedly a valuable service, I have some concerns about its independence and long term intentions.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

2 Comments
  • Great write-up Ben and I think that this type of thing has been going on for a while since most integration companies came out with the “Stores” concept for integration apps, which have never worked and now turn to an API “Hub” of sorts to try to get more exposure to drive revenue.

    In the end this too shall not work for business users out there I think either.

    ~Clint
    @cazoomi

  • Hi Ben, I understand the scepticism, yes we are a vendor, but we also have open source roots have built the largest integration community in the world around Mule ESB. We came to building APIhub after being on the consumer side of hundreds of APIs, helping our customers and community integrate. The challenge we found was the developer experience for APIs varied wildly and was often unpleasant. The API experience to date has been disaggregated and we felt that for the API Economy to flourish both API producers and consumers need to connect on a common social platform. The developers are the kingmakers here and we’re investing heavily to create a destination that helps any developer discover APIs quickly. If APIhub is successful I believe it will be great for the whole industry since developers can waste less time on discovering APIs (and make less mistakes) and API publishers have a clear feedback channel from their developers that will help them improve.

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