A Developer S Guide To API

User Manual:

Open the PDF directly: View PDF .
Page Count: 16

Download
Open PDF In Browser	View PDF

For: Application
Development
& Delivery
Professionals

A Developer’s Guide To Forrester’s
Strategies For API Success
by Randy Heffner, June 9, 2015

Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA
Tel: +1 617.613.6000 | Fax: +1 617.613.5000 | www.forrester.com

For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

June 9, 2015

A Developer’s Guide To Forrester’s Strategies
For API Success
A Guided Tour Of Forrester’s Research On The What, Why, And How
Of APIs
by Randy Heffner
with Christopher Mines and Derek Nahabedian

Why Read This Report
In these times of customer empowerment, digital business, and mobile mind shifts, APIs and serviceoriented architecture (SOA) form a critical foundation for modern business and applications. The biggest
mistake we see application development and delivery (AD&D) pros make is to think of APIs only as a
technical strategy for application integration and mobile apps. Instead, think of them as integral to your
strategies for rapid digital business change, broad ecosystem connectivity, and world-class customer
engagement. Forrester’s research in this area helps clients establish and evolve a well-grounded software
strategy. This report ties together Forrester’s body of research on APIs and SOA, making a cohesive whole
out of 34 reports, clarifying how each adds value to the whole, and filling in gaps between reports.

Table Of Contents

Notes & Resources

2 APIs And SOA Are Critical For Digital
Business Success

Forrester synthesized its most important
research relating to APIs and SOA, telling
the broader story to tie our body of research
together and fill in gaps between reports.

4 How To Set Strategy For APIs And SOA
5 Architecture Sets The Proper Context For
Design Of APIs And SOA

Related Research Documents

8 Effective API Strategy Requires Agile
Processes And Governance

Drive Business Agility And Value By
Increasing Your API And SOA Maturity

9 Mature API Platforms Cover Five Major
Areas

Establish Your API Design Strategy
How APIs Reframe Business Strategy

recommendations

13 Make Agile-Plus-Architecture The
Foundation Of API Strategy

© 2015, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available
resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar,
and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. To
purchase reprints of this document, please email clientsupport@forrester.com. For additional information, go to www.forrester.com.

For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

A Developer’s Guide To Forrester’s Strategies For API Success

APIs And SOA Are Critical For Digital Business Success
Forrester often advises AD&D clients about APIs in the context of mobile apps or some other
targeted initiative. Sometimes these conversations extend to open APIs, such as those available from
big Internet players like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, and others. It’s not as often that we hear API
conversations about ensuring the future of an enterprise in a world of digital disruption and the age
of the customer. But this broader context is the most important discussion to have about APIs, as
described in this report:
How APIs Reframe Business Strategy
Randy Heffner
Why do APIs rise to the level of business strategy? The need for digital business transformation
means that executives — both business and technology executives — must put their organizations in
play in multiple ecosystems of value that connect digital resources inside and outside the company,
as described in this report:
The Digital Business Imperative
Martin Gill, Nigel Fenwick
In this context, it is important for AD&D pros and businesspeople to understand that most anything
can be a digital resource because either it is already digital (e.g., data, applications, connected
devices, etc.) or it can have a digital proxy (e.g., the location code posted by a public transit stop, a
Twitter handle that serves as an entry point to the customer service team, etc.). Furthermore, an
organization’s most important digital resources are its unique core competencies and business
assets, which are the foundation of API-enabled business agility. API enablement is a key means of
embedding digital agility into everyday operations, which is part of a digital business road map:
Develop A Digital Business Road Map That Drives Innovation
Martin Gill
APIs feed multiple angles into rapid business change, as described here:
Selecting Tools That Enable Agility
Martin Gill

June 9, 2015

For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

A Developer’s Guide To Forrester’s Strategies For API Success

APIs And SOA Embody Business Design In Modern Applications
To understand and pursue a mature and effective enterprise strategy for APIs and SOA, AD&D pros
should begin by getting two key things clear:
1. SOA is alive and well, so the strategy should include both APIs and SOA. Although it may
surprise some, SOA is still very much alive, well, and necessary for modern applications. Why is
this an important clarification? Because as adoption of APIs and representational state transfer
(REST)-based messaging grows, Forrester hears many voices discounting SOA as old, dead, and
irrelevant. However, they’re using poor definitions of SOA.1 The reality is that much new work is
happening under the banner of SOA. This means that the proper conversation for enterprises to
have about service-based strategies is not merely about APIs, but about APIs and SOA together.
Furthermore, it means that most SOA best practices have corollary or equivalent API best
practices.
However, neither SOA nor APIs have a single definition with which one can go to the market
and expect others to be using the same definition. Forrester recommends that clients treat SOA
as the part of the strategy aimed at building core business agility and treat APIs as extending the
reach of their business agility to many new contexts.2 The continuing importance of both SOA
and APIs is clear from the enterprise adoption data presented in this report:
Customer Engagement Needs APIs, But REST Is Far From A Complete Integration Strategy
Randy Heffner
2. APIs and SOA require first and foremost a business design perspective. While SOA services
and APIs can (and should) both be used for technical scenarios such as integration and
application delivery, it is critical to understand that your most valuable and strategic APIs and
SOA services are those that embody business transactions and queries. These services provide
business building blocks (rather than mere technical building blocks) for consistent business
results no matter from what customer touchpoint, B2B partner integration, or internal business
process a transaction originates.
This means that an effective approach to services will differentiate between different types
of services and be quite deliberate about design, coordination, and governance for business
services and APIs. This earlier report described the value and impact of a business-focused
approach to SOA, and the discussion applies equally to business APIs:
Build SOA Success With A Business-Focused Approach To SOA Design And Governance
Randy Heffner

June 9, 2015

For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

A Developer’s Guide To Forrester’s Strategies For API Success

How To Set Strategy For APIs And SOA
Armed with a business-focused and broad-based view that combines APIs and SOA, AD&D pros
have the right perspectives from which to begin evolving the rest of their enterprise API strategy.
Central to success is an incremental approach embodying what Forrester calls street-level strategy,
which has three major steps:
1. Craft a high-level vision — and stop there. This is the strategy part of a street-level strategy.
Don’t write a 300-page architectural treatise about how to do APIs or SOA. Instead, outline
key concepts and aspects of strategy at the “mile wide, inch deep” level. Make it only as
detailed as needed to a) make stakeholders aware of the breadth of considerations and possible
investments; b) identify (but not design) the major processes, delivery patterns, and governance
structures; and c) guide just-in-time drill-downs and elaborations as part of step 2.
2. Do projects, leveraging them for incremental strategy implementation. This is the street-level
part. Use each project to advance and mature the implementation of one or more aspects of the
service-based strategy. Use Agile-plus-Architecture practices to collaboratively decide which
aspects are most important to each project’s success or which practices the project provides an
excellent opportunity to develop.3 Don’t worry too much if street-level investments don’t take
you straight toward the vision — some zigging and zagging is inevitable along the way.
3. Use project experience to adjust the vision. As you gain more real-world experience with
each project, you become much smarter about how to structure the vision and design the
architecture to achieve it. So keep adjusting the vision and strategy by returning to step 1.
Understand The Separate Starting Points For APIs And SOA
To help accomplish a first iteration of step 1, this report provides a comprehensive overview of eight
major areas of maturity common to APIs and SOA, together with unique aspects of each:
Drive Business Agility And Value By Increasing Your API And SOA Maturity
Randy Heffner
Although there are major areas of maturity common to both, there are different viewpoints and
starting points for APIs and for SOA. Specifically:

■ API strategy starts by understanding four API categories, especially product APIs. To

structure the API side of the strategy, you must start by understanding the four major categories
of APIs: open Web, B2B, internal, and product APIs. The first three of these are commonly
discussed in the industry, sometimes using the monikers public, partner, and private APIs. The
fourth category, product APIs, is not often discussed, but is critical as an alternate perspective
into brainstorming possible APIs and business ecosystems. These reports define and describe
the four categories, as well as calling out major aspects of API design and key similarities and
differences between APIs and SOA:

June 9, 2015

For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

A Developer’s Guide To Forrester’s Strategies For API Success

Establish Your API Design Strategy
Randy Heffner
Brief: Product APIs Create Distinct Customer Value And Opportunity
Randy Heffner

■ The starting point for SOA is a focus on business agility. To illustrate the continuing value

of SOA to core business flexibility, this report tells the story of how SOA was a critical element
of success in the merger that created EE, a UK-based telco, including key aspects of how EE
approached Forrester’s eight major areas of maturity for APIs and SOA:

SOA Plays An Important Role In A Telco Merger
Randy Heffner
Architecture Sets The Proper Context For Design Of APIs And SOA
Business-focused design is the most critical design aspect for AD&D pros to center on for APIs
and SOA, however, because not all services are business services/APIs, a complete discussion of
API design best practices must understand and account for the architecture context around various
services. This sets the right foundation for detailed service design.
Put Strong Architecture Context Around APIs And SOA
Forrester’s business-centered vision for the future of solution architecture shows how to organize
the constantly expanding universe of technology infrastructure and options around business design
concepts. At the center of Forrester’s vision, business APIs and services embody an enterprise’s core
digital business capabilities. The architecture context begins by putting a finer point on this central
position for APIs:

■ Understand that interface design is the fulcrum of the architecture with APIs and SOA. The
very center of the architecture is the interface design for an API or an SOA service. Interface
design, separate from the details of how a service is implemented, is the fulcrum of the
architecture. Interfaces are the leverage point and, as with a mechanical lever, their placement
(i.e., their designs) relative to other aspects of services are the single most important factor
determining whether your API/SOA strategy machine will accomplish what you intended it to
and how much work it will require to accomplish the strategy’s goals.

■ Set a business-centered solution architecture context around business services/APIs. To

understand how solutions can simultaneously benefit from APIs and a large number of other
technology trends, Forrester’s solution architecture vision places business APIs in the context
of 1) multitouchpoint role-based workspaces; 2) process definitions that control the flow of
customer engagement and work across an organization’s internal and external ecosystems; 3)

June 9, 2015

For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

A Developer’s Guide To Forrester’s Strategies For API Success

virtualized views of data that unify across siloed legacy and cloud solutions; and 4) a variety of
technologies for analytics, rules, collaboration, and more that provide business insight, control,
and optimization. This report describes the vision; note that as a vision report intended to
reframe enterprise thinking, this report centers on the strategic endpoint, not the street-level
path to get there:4
The Future Of Solution Architecture: Six Business Design Focal Points
Randy Heffner

■ Extend the business-centered context into the integration architecture. When APIs and SOA
services are applied to integration scenarios, a business-design focus is often left behind. To
counter this tendency, we crafted an alternate articulation of our solution architecture vision
from the perspective of integration strategy. To this articulation, we apply the term “digital
business design” to emphasize the need to recenter away from technical integration software
and application silos and toward business design. Again, business APIs and services are central
to the vision. As with the previous report, this provides the strategic vision without discussing
the street-level path to get there:5

Digital Business Design Is The New Integration
Randy Heffner
Establish Strong Design Guidance For A Variety Of APIs And SOA Service Types
Many AD&D pros put too much of their effort about API design into theoretical discussions
about REST, including hypermedia as the engine of application state (HATEOAS), nouns versus
verbs, HTTP error codes, and the like. These are useful discussions, but they miss more important
concerns about designing comprehensible APIs, ensuring developers understand how to design
different types of APIs, and evolving coherent portfolios of APIs. Forrester’s guidance begins with
the layering needed when designing APIs for mobile, then continues with a comprehensive API
design series:

■ APIs for mobile apps require three major layers, each with different design concerns. It is

clear that APIs are needed for mobile, but beyond that, design guidance is often hard to find.
The central concept is to plan for three major layers: 1) business APIs, as described earlier
in this report; 2) multitouchpoint APIs, which are built to provide common and familiar
customer engagement across all of an organization’s touchpoints; and 3) touchpoint-specific
APIs, which handle specific requirements for presentation and engagement through individual
touchpoints. Multitouchpoint and touchpoint-specific APIs are best thought of as being part of
the user experience (UX) layer of one’s solution architecture. This report provides guidance and
clarification, using a point-counterpoint structure to balance API design considerations:

June 9, 2015

For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

A Developer’s Guide To Forrester’s Strategies For API Success

How To Design APIs For Mobile
Randy Heffner

■ Understand that REST APIs are not the only option. To guide clients in rounding out their

comprehensive API design guidelines, Forrester has created a four-part series on API design.
Although the industry is currently favoring REST-based APIs, Forrester clients shouldn’t fear
using simple object access protocol (SOAP) if the situation makes it appropriate. Our API
design series begins by positioning various styles of REST-based messaging against SOAP and
message-oriented middleware (MOM), including a comparison of pragmatic REST and highend REST theory:

API Design, Part 1: REST Is The Leading But Not Only Option For Your APIs
Randy Heffner

■ Design APIs for the audience that will use them. The second part of the series covers a broad

set of basic considerations for API design, focusing heavily on REST while touching on scenarios
where SOAP or MOM may be a better choice. A key part of Forester’s guidance includes
consideration of the target audience for an API, including the possibility that multiple audiences
may require different messaging styles. The report also notes multiple alternative styles of APIs,
including JavaScript APIs and language bindings via software development kits (SDKs):

API Design, Part 2: Design Messaging Styles By Balancing Reach With Your Other Design Goals
Randy Heffner

■ Design APIs for high quality of service. With all the discussion about REST being simple and

easy, and with so many REST APIs being created for simple, quick, and low quality-of-service
(QoS) data access, there is a dearth of guidance in the industry on how to achieve high QoS
with REST. To address this gap, transaction management and error handling are key parts of the
third report in Forrester’s API design series:

API Design, Part 3: Make Transactions And Error Handling Clear In Your API Designs
Randy Heffner

■ Round out design guidelines with security and future-proofing. The last part in the API

design series outlines five major scenarios for trust enablement with APIs (i.e., authentication
and authorization), including scenarios for third-party authorization using OAuth2. The other
major topic that the report addresses is designing APIs for future change, which requires
balancing open-ended design with data integrity:

API Design, Part 4: Future-Proof And Secure Your APIs To Fit Your Usage Scenarios
Randy Heffner

June 9, 2015

For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

A Developer’s Guide To Forrester’s Strategies For API Success

As a final note on API design, the industry conversation about microservices is growing, but there is
great confusion over what microservices are and how to design them. The first thing to note is that
there are two ways to think about and use the term “microservices”:

■ Microservices as a component-based, container-based structure. In this definition of

microservices, container technologies such as Docker are used to structure an application as
a collection of relatively small, separately deployable units.6 This use of microservices borrows
heavily from early 2000s concepts of component-based development, including the potential for
marketplaces for components.7

■ Microservices as an API design concept. In this definition of microservices, a common

phrase is “an API should do one thing and do one thing well.” Forrester often hears this notion
contrasted with ways that SOA services were created, but in such cases, the reference is almost
always to SOA design worst practices. It is still important to have coarse-grained business
services (e.g., submitOrder) to achieve consistent results through all customer touchpoints,
while also creating very fine-grained services (e.g., a type-ahead API).

These two notions of microservices may be used together or separately. This report puts the two
definitions in the context of a major shift in application delivery:
From Application Design To Application Composition
Kurt Bittner, Michael Facemire
Effective API Strategy Requires Agile Processes And Governance
A key reason to have strong design guidance for APIs is that understanding the various types of
APIs acts as a foundation for AD&D pros to set the right agile governance strategies. Some APIs
require less governance (e.g., touchpoint-specific APIs for mobile) while others require more (e.g.,
core business APIs). But either way, governance is important because:

■ No governance means an incoherent collection of APIs and negative customer impact. As

we learned with SOA, so it still is with APIs: If application delivery teams simply toss together
whatever APIs seem good for their immediate purpose, with no collaboration across teams,
they may achieve good results for their isolated applications, but the enterprise as a whole will
achieve little, if any, synergy with APIs. Negative enterprise impact may include disconnected
and confusing customer engagement across touchpoints, unreliable transaction handling,
inefficient and duplicative back-end processes, and unnecessary costs for developing and
maintaining duplicate APIs.

June 9, 2015

For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

A Developer’s Guide To Forrester’s Strategies For API Success

■ Agile-plus-Architecture provides a foundation for collaborative success. These sorts of bad

results can be prevented with agile governance structures, developer-architect connections, and
multilayered architecture collaboration, which are all best practices for infusing architecture
governance into Agile and continuous delivery methods. With Agile-plus-Architecture,
delivery teams gain the requisite context to design APIs that fit within a broader portfolio, and
architects’ activities are better focused on the near-term context and needs of delivery teams.
This report describes more than 30 Agile-plus-Architecture best practices across four major
categories (business architecture and project context, project delivery guidance and governance,
architecture management and technology selection, and organization and culture):

Best Practices For Agile-Plus-Architecture
Randy Heffner
This report provides background and support for Agile-plus-Architecture through Forrester
survey results that highlight ways that architects and developers can work better together:
A Guide To More Effective Developer-Architect Relations
Randy Heffner

■ Service portfolio management is a key governance discipline. Among the SOA best practices

that can help to structure Agile-plus-Architecture collaboration for APIs is service portfolio
management, which guides service design and evolution using lightweight definitions of target
service portfolios. Teams use service portfolios to identify when to build new APIs and to more
reliably identify which APIs should be used on any given project. In addition to being an overall
API/SOA best practice, service portfolio management is often a key responsibility of a center of
excellence (CoE), as described in these earlier reports:

Survey Results Show SOA Governance Improves SOA Benefit Realization
Randy Heffner
The Five Most Valuable SOA Governance Practices
Randy Heffner
SOA Centers of Excellence: The Five Most Valuable Practices That Keep SOA On Track
Randy Heffner
Mature API Platforms Cover Five Major Areas
Although API management is the hot new product category for APIs, a mature API platform requires
much more than API management. Forrester identifies five major elements of a mature API platform:

June 9, 2015

For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

A Developer’s Guide To Forrester’s Strategies For API Success

■ Service delivery infrastructure. This area covers a broad array of alternatives for where and

how an API or SOA service implementation runs. The business logic of the API may reside
within a vintage application on a mainframe, on a Node.js server, on a traditional application
server (e.g., Java EE, .NET), in an off-the-shelf application (whether on-premises or cloud), or
on other platforms.8 The business logic may be accessed directly (e.g., direct call to a Salesforce
or SAP API), through integration software (e.g., integration platform-as-a-service [iPaaS],
enterprise service bus [ESB]), or through an application gateway.9 Each of these different
runtime environments will have its own built-in or other available development tools.

■ Service testing and virtualization. Every API must be thoroughly tested on its own, separately
from any application that calls it.10 This includes both functional testing and performance
testing. In addition, it is important to be able to retest APIs on demand as part of regression
testing and production problem resolution. Finally, it facilitates Agile and continuous delivery
for teams to be able to test using a virtual service (i.e., a simulated implementation of a service)
so that teams that are using APIs and creating APIs don’t have to proceed in lock-step.

■ API management. This element centers on the relationships between API users and API

providers. API users may be internal or external to the API provider’s organization. External
API users may further be categorized as individual developers or B2B trading partners. API
management solutions include a developer portal, API product manager features, security and
policy enforcement capabilities, and functions for adapting an existing API/service the way the
provider desires it to be used.

■ Service runtime management. This element ensures top-quality API operations by monitoring
and managing APIs not only at the edge where API requests and responses traverse but also
across the various layers of infrastructure and APIs behind the API interface.

■ Service life-cycle management. Aside from managing usage and operations of APIs/services,
a mature API program will have defined and managed life cycles for creating various types of
APIs and services.

The reasons for and interactions among these last three platform elements (service runtime
management, service life-cycle management, and API management) are described in this report:
How To Manage APIs For Customer Engagement
Randy Heffner

June 9, 2015

For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

A Developer’s Guide To Forrester’s Strategies For API Success

Diverse Enterprise Requirements Feed A Diverse API Management Market
Among these five elements of API platforms, the newest kid on the block is API management.
Because APIs themselves are used in many diverse scenarios, there is room in the market for a
variety of styles of API management solutions from a variety of vendors. Forrester fields many client
inquiries on the space because:

■ API management is a rapidly growing market with four major segments. In our sizing of the
API management market, we identify four segments: API management pure plays; vendors that
combine API management with integration and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings; major
services vendors with defined API management offerings; and vendors with platforms for API
management, governance, and SOA:

Sizing The Market For API Management Solutions
Randy Heffner, Michael Yamnitsky

■ API management solutions vary widely. Because of the wide diversity across API management
solutions, Forrester published two corollary reports with our Forrester Wave™ evaluation
for API management. These reports provide clients with additional insight and resources for
selecting among the vendors. Clients can download the detailed Forrester Wave evaluation
spreadsheet by mousing over the Forrester Wave graphic to bring up the download link:

The Forrester Wave™: API Management Solutions, Q3 2014
Randy Heffner
The API Management Buyer’s Guide, Q3 2014
Randy Heffner
Applying The Forrester Wave™: API Management Solutions, Q3 2014
Randy Heffner
Note that since the Forrester Wave published, at least five additional product vendors have entered
the market with API management offerings: Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Software AG, and WaveMaker.
Forrester will be providing an initial look at these solutions in an upcoming API management
market update report, which will also note key systems integrators with well-developed API
management implementation offerings, such as Torry Harris Business Solutions.
Other API Platform Elements Include Both Active And Mature Market Spaces
For the other API platform elements, Forrester’s coverage for AD&D pros is guided by the level of
maturity versus active product development within the market space. Here are some key themes for
other API platform elements:

June 9, 2015

For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

A Developer’s Guide To Forrester’s Strategies For API Success

■ Application gateways continue as an active space aside from API management. Every API

management solution includes embedded gateway functionality, but application gateways also
continue on as a standalone market space. We will be updating our Forrester Wave in this space
in late 2015 or early 2016. Since our most recent Forrester Wave, we’ve seen these changes to the
vendor landscape for gateways include 1) CA Technologies bought Layer 7; 2) Axway bought
Vordel; 3) Tibco Software has rewritten its gateway into a more competitive offering; 4) Progress
Software’s gateway is part of the Actional product, which Aurea bought, and 5) Software AG no
longer resells Layer 7’s gateway:

The Forrester Wave™: SOA Application Gateways, Q4 2011
Randy Heffner

■ API/service testing is critical, though often undervalued by enterprises. As with other

software, APIs require both functional and performance testing. In addition, service
virtualization allows API users to proceed with development without waiting for APIs to
be developed and enhanced. This parallel development facilitates delivery speed. However,
Forrester often observes that clients do not place a high enough priority on tools for service
testing. These two Forrester Waves provide a foundation for API testing tool selection:

The Forrester Wave™: Modern Application Functional Test Automation Tools, Q2 2015
Diego Lo Giudice
The Forrester Wave™: Service Virtualization And Testing Solutions, Q1 2014
Diego Lo Giudice

■ The term “API management” wrongly implies that the category covers runtime

management. API management solutions are limited when it comes to providing top-quality
production operation of APIs and SOA services. On their own, API management solutions
can provide only surface-level visibility into service operations. Service runtime management
provides deeper visibility into the layered implementations common for APIs and services.
This is why, even before the rise of the industry API discussion, service runtime management
showed signs of being the most beneficial specialty product category for services:

SOA Product Adoption: SOA Management Solutions Provide The Strongest Benefit
Randy Heffner

■ Service runtime management is a relatively mature product category. Because of this

maturity, we will not be updating our most recent Forrester Wave of the space. The rate of
change in the market is low. Since we published this Forrester Wave report, the most significant
change is that Progress Software sold its Actional product (and other products) to Aurea.
Software AG continues to OEM Actional as webMethods Insight. SOA Software has renamed
itself to Akana.

June 9, 2015

For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

A Developer’s Guide To Forrester’s Strategies For API Success

The Forrester Wave™: Standalone SOA Management Solutions, Q4 2011
Randy Heffner

■ Service life-cycle management is mature, excepting its inclusion in API management. As

with service runtime management, we will not be updating our most recent Forrester Wave (but
the functionality of life-cycle management appears as a part of our API management solutions
Forrester Wave). The two changes to the vendor landscape are that 1) SOA Software is now
Akana and 2) Progress Software’s solution was discontinued:

The Forrester Wave™: SOA Service Life-Cycle Management, Q1 2012
Randy Heffner
We will include vendor and product guidance for API/service delivery infrastructure in an
upcoming guided tour for integration architecture.

R e c o m m e n d at i o n s

Make Agile-Plus-Architecture The Foundation Of API Strategy
Across all of Forrester’s advice for APIs, SOA, and service-based strategy, the best starting place
for AD&D pros building an API strategy is to ensure an Agile-plus-Architecture foundation. It is
only by combining the two that an enterprise can meet and sustain the speed-of-delivery promises
of APIs and services. Furthermore, only by combining the two can an enterprise evolve coherent
portfolios of APIs and services within each major business domain. Each report referenced above
has other important recommendations for AD&D pros relevant to its specific topic area, and every
one of these separate recommendations will deliver better results within a street-level strategy
grounded in Agile-plus-Architecture best practices.

Endnotes
1

More evidence that SOA is alive and well is the number of conference sessions on or referencing SOA at
major vendor events. After one IBM event, Forrester described what we saw. Source: Randy Heffner, “Sorry,
Kids: APIs Have Not And Will Not Kill SOA,”Randy Heffner’s Blog, May 2, 2014 (http://blogs.forrester.com/
randy_heffner/14-05-02-sorry_kids_apis_have_not_and_will_not_kill_soa).

Forrester describes the different ways to relate the terms “SOA” and “APIs” as a foundation for
understanding API and SOA maturity. See the “Drive Business Agility And Value By Increasing Your API
And SOA Maturity” Forrester report.

June 9, 2015

For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

A Developer’s Guide To Forrester’s Strategies For API Success

Organizations must be able to sustain and increase their rate of change over time. Agile development
practices and continuous delivery are essential tools, but so is an architecture that enables resilience.
Combining Agile and architecture is challenging because their respective goals of delivering now and
preparing for the future often appear to be at odds. Forrester outlines the challenges that developers and
architects face in trying to collaborate, and identifies important resources that both sides can draw upon.
See the “Agile-Plus-Architecture: Embrace The Oxymoron” Forrester report.

Two separate reports provide perspectives and decision models for street-level strategy for evolving toward
Forrester’s vision for the future of solution architecture. See the “The Future Of Solution Architecture,
Part 1: Business Processes Within A Capability” Forrester report and see the “The Future Of Solution
Architecture, Part 2: User Roles Within A Business Capability” Forrester report.

A separate report provides a perspective on street-level strategy for evolving toward Forrester’s vision for
digital business design. See the “How To Implement Digital Business Design” Forrester report.

There is a quiet revolution underway in software development that leverages openly available services
fronted by APIs, service-rich platforms, and deployment technologies like microservices and containers.
See the “From Application Design To Application Composition” Forrester report.

It is clear that OS-level containers are beneficial for application architectures and life cycles, but several
important questions remain about Docker. Forrester clarifies for app developers the most significant things
that are known about Docker and the critical questions that remain. See the “Nine Questions To Ask About
Docker” Forrester report.

JavaScript and the Node.js runtime environment in particular are becoming an increasingly important part
of an enterprise environment. See the “The Dawn Of Enterprise JavaScript” Forrester report.

Forrester’s most recent Forrester Wave for enterprise service buses will be superseded by one or more
Forrester Waves including cloud integration and other options for application integration. Since we
published our last ESB Forrester Wave, we’ve seen many changes to the vendor landscape: 1) Red Hat
bought FuseSource, 2) Progress Software sold its Sonic ESB to Aurea, and 3) IBM has combined its ESB
offerings into one product, IBM Integration Bus. For more information, see the “The Forrester Wave™:
Enterprise Service Buses, Q1 2009” Forrester report.

With increasingly complex applications and layering, it is important to automate tests at all layers of an
architecture by going beyond GUI automation testing to testing at the API, service, and process levels. See
the “Five Must-Do’s For Testing Quality At Speed” Forrester report.

June 9, 2015

About Forrester
A global research and advisory firm, Forrester inspires leaders,
informs better decisions, and helps the world’s top companies turn
the complexity of change into business advantage. Our researchbased insight and objective advice enable IT professionals to
lead more successfully within IT and extend their impact beyond
the traditional IT organization. Tailored to your individual role, our
resources allow you to focus on important business issues —
margin, speed, growth — first, technology second.
for more information
To find out how Forrester Research can help you be successful every day, please
contact the office nearest you, or visit us at www.forrester.com. For a complete list
of worldwide locations, visit www.forrester.com/about.
Client support
For information on hard-copy or electronic reprints, please contact Client Support
at +1 866.367.7378, +1 617.613.5730, or clientsupport@forrester.com. We offer
quantity discounts and special pricing for academic and nonprofit institutions.

Forrester Focuses On
Application Development & Delivery Professionals
Responsible for leading the development and delivery of applications
that support your company’s business strategies, you also choose
technology and architecture while managing people, skills, practices,
and organization to maximize value. Forrester’s subject-matter expertise
and deep understanding of your role will help you create forward-thinking
strategies; weigh opportunity against risk; justify decisions; and optimize
your individual, team, and corporate performance.

Forrester Research (Nasdaq: FORR) is a global research and advisory firm serving professionals in 13 key roles across three distinct client
segments. Our clients face progressively complex business and technology decisions every day. To help them understand, strategize, and act
upon opportunities brought by change, Forrester provides proprietary research, consumer and business data, custom consulting, events and
online communities, and peer-to-peer executive programs. We guide leaders in business technology, marketing and strategy, and the technology
industry through independent fact-based insight, ensuring their business success today and tomorrow.
122957

Source Exif Data:

File Type                       : PDF
File Type Extension             : pdf
MIME Type                       : application/pdf
PDF Version                     : 1.3
Linearized                      : Yes
XMP Toolkit                     : Adobe XMP Core 5.3-c011 66.145661, 2012/02/06-14:56:27
Create Date                     : 2015:06:09 14:19:10+08:00
Metadata Date                   : 2015:06:09 14:19:12+08:00
Modify Date                     : 2015:06:09 14:19:12+08:00
Creator Tool                    : Adobe InDesign CS6 (Windows)
Instance ID                     : uuid:384de370-07a0-462e-814d-e6984a426deb
Original Document ID            : adobe:docid:indd:aac54d68-3fda-11e1-a09e-ff2111df76af
Document ID                     : xmp.id:72446098690EE511A14D868AB7B38E0A
Rendition Class                 : proof:pdf
Derived From Instance ID        : xmp.iid:F57215126F0EE511971EB7B5C8D9ED49
Derived From Document ID        : xmp.did:3EE84621F1D2E411A99E9934B0FC5A69
Derived From Original Document ID: adobe:docid:indd:aac54d68-3fda-11e1-a09e-ff2111df76af
Derived From Rendition Class    : default
History Action                  : converted
History Parameters              : from application/x-indesign to application/pdf
History Software Agent          : Adobe InDesign CS6 (Windows)
History Changed                 : /
History When                    : 2015:06:09 14:19:10+08:00
Format                          : application/pdf
Producer                        : Adobe PDF Library 10.0.1
Trapped                         : False
Page Count                      : 16
Creator                         : Adobe InDesign CS6 (Windows)

EXIF Metadata provided by EXIF.tools

A Developer S Guide To API

Navigation menu

Versions of this User Manual:

Views

Navigation