Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Developers use application programming interfaces, or APIs, to assemble data and functionality for new mobile or web apps, but when it comes to interacting with APIs, developers are often faced with two popular options: REST or GraphQL. In this article, we’ll explore how these approaches compare, and we’ll offer REST API best practices that can be applied to build a more consistent experience for GraphQL API consumers.

Organizations are increasingly investing in digital businesses ecosystem strategies to foster innovation and operate efficiently. These ecosystems connect various stakeholders--such as partners, developers, and customers--via application programming interfaces, or APIs. APIs allow various software systems to interface, and are thus the primary mechanism of value exchange within these ecosystems.

Like any online service, your API users expect high availability and good performance. This also means one customer should not be able to starve another customer’s access to your API. Adding rate limiting is a defensive measure which can protect your API from being overwhelmed with requests and improve general availability. Similarly, adding quota management also ensures customers stay within their contract terms and obligations ensuring you’re able to monetize your API.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA for short, is a set of laws around handling health-related data in information systems. It defines safeguards, which are rules you have to follow when handling health data for your customers. There are three safeguard categories: All three categories have to be handled correctly if you want your API to be HIPAA compliant. In a companion article we covered those key requirements and how to build HIPAA complaint API platforms.

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.

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.

This tutorial shows you how easy it is to build a custom Lua plugin for Kong Gateway. My Kong Lua plugin example will automatically add a custom header to any response sent out, indicating the current plugin version. Kong Gateway is built on OpenResty, which extends the NGINX proxy server to run Lua scripts. It sits as a proxy between a client’s requests and routes them to defined services.