The icons on your phone’s main screen may be discrete, separate shapes, but in reality, today’s mobile apps are more likely to be an interconnected web of functionality.
Examples abound: logging in via Facebook, Twitter, or some other social media account. Dynamic advertising that in some cases interacts directly with application functionality. Apps that launch each other, creating chains or even networks of interdependent functionality.
Mobile applications have penetrated the enterprise as well. Today’s enterprise mobile apps are not only interfaces to traditional apps like CRM or ERP, but they also empower users to connect functionality and data from multiple apps – all from the phone.
In fact, it’s rare these days to find a mobile app that doesn’t connect to something else. The secret sauce behind this web of functionality is the Application Programming Interface (API). APIs are the building blocks that modern mobile app developers use to assemble today’s apps and connect them to back end platforms and applications.
APIs, in fact, have been around for many years. In the early days of computing, APIs were the interfaces between different pieces of software on the same computer. With the rise of distributed computing, APIs played a critical role in helping software on different computers both communicate and control each other.
Read the entire article at http://www.softwareag.com/blog/reality_check/index.php/authors-for-home/the-api-empowered-mobile-application/.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Software AG is an Intellyx client. At the time of writing, no other organizations mentioned are Intellyx clients.
