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Launching an API is hard. You need to make sure your service is reliable, secure and well-documented. This is where API Management tools come into play. They provide the means to expose your API to external developers in an easy and affordable manner. One of the best definitions of API management is the one introduced by APIacademy:

But first, let us know which are YOUR favourite API management tools. Take the Developer Economics Survey and you may win amazing prizes and gear.

“Creating a centralized API architecture that makes the process of composing, securing and managing high-performance interfaces significantly simpler and more consistent.”

Features of an API Management service

API management services have a multitude of features. Their main focus is to make designing, deploying and managing an API easier, as well as to ensure that it is safe, secure and functional. Some of these tools facilitate integrations, transformations or API orchestrations. Ideally, an API management service should at least cover most of the below basics:

Documentation – Sounds boring, right? Still, one of the most common problems of developers is figuring out how an API works. Development time is too precious to waste in trial and error of an undocumented API. An API management service has to provide an easy way to read the documentation and enable developers to “try before they buy”. In some cases it is even possible to provide interactive documentation. Simplicity and usability are the keys!
Analytics and Statistics – It is critical to understand how people use your API and get insights for your business.
Deployment – Should be flexible and support public or private clouds, on-premises implementations, or combinations.
Developer engagement – Engaging with your API consumers, developer or partners is important. Getting an easily accessible developer portal will significantly facilitate onboarding.
Sandbox environment – This feature will increase both the value of an API and its adoption rate. What better than being able to develop and test your code.
Traffic management and caching abilities.
Security – APIs carry sensitive data, so it is important to protect the exposed information. The service has to at least provide identity and access management for users and developers.
Monetization – Provide the capability to monetize your API.
Availability – Should be available, scalable and redundant. An API environment can become demanding and the service should be able to deal with any kind of errors, problems or temporary traffic spikes.
Support of Legacy systems.

To Proxy or not to Proxy?

The vendors in the API management space provide a number of solutions across the above main categories but that does not mean they support everything. They are implementing their solution in three different ways: Proxies, Agents or Hybrid.

API service providers that use the concept of a Proxy. Their solution “sits” between the customer and their users and the traffic goes through them. Proxies provide caching capabilities and protection of customer’s back-end infrastructure from traffic spikes. The main criticism they receive is that they increase the cost and bring up privacy and latency issues. Apigee, Mashape and Mashery are examples of such implementations.
API service providers that use the concept of agents. Agents are plugins that integrate with your server. They do not get in the way of the API calls like proxies. As a result they do not introduce network latencies or 3rd-party dependencies. On the other side, features like caching are not easy to implement. 3scale is an example of such implementation.
API service providers that use a hybrid approach. This means you may get an agent and a proxy. For example you may want to use a proxy for the caching and the agent for authentication. Companies like Apigee or 3scale we talked before are also moving to hybrid solutions.

13 API management tools

Deciding on an API Management Tool, you are faced with lots of choices. Available solutions may focus in one or two or cover many of the features discussed above and vary greatly in price. There are tools that were acquired by bigger vendors like Intel or CA or Microsoft. Open source tools are also available. Last but not least, some tools are heavy enterprise focused and other much less so.

Name	Type	License	Stackoverflow questions	Market segment	Strong Points
3scale	Agent, Proxy	Commercial	15	Startups to Enterprises	Wide range of tools
ApiAxle	Proxy	GPL	9	SMBs to Enterprises
Apigee	Proxy	Commercial	598	SMBs to Enterprises	Powerful Analytics
Axway	Proxy	Commercial	9	SMBs to Enterprises
CA Layer7	Proxy	Commercial	35	Enterprises	Advanced support for mobile applications
IBM API Management	Agent, Proxy	Commercial	17	Enterprises	Large Scale, User friendly
Mashape	Proxy	Commercial	106	Startups to Enterprises	Monetization, discoverabilty
Mashery	Agent, Proxy	Commercial	57	SMBs to Enterprises	API strategy services
Microsoft’s Azure API Management	Agent, Proxy	Commercial	262	Startups to Enterprises
MuleSoft	Proxy	Commercial	134	Enterprises	Based on proven open source technology, programmableweb
Oracle SOA	Proxy	Commercial	213	Enterprises	Large scale, SOA
Akana (formely SOA Software)	Proxy	Commercial	3	Enterprises
WSO2	Agent, Proxy	Apache	4421	Startups to Enterprises	Open source

3scale

3Scale is very active on the API management space with a wide range of customers, ranging from startups to enterprises. They provide a hybrid solution to help you deploy, manage, distribute and monitor your API. They offer an on premises API management solution along with cloud based API administration, analytics, reports, developer and partner portal.
More about 3Scale: http://www.3scale.net/api-management/

Mashape

Mashape does not offer an API Management service per se. They provide important features that are part of such services though. You may test an API, generate code, and get a developer portal and user management. Most importantly they provide out-of-the-box monetization, a developer community and discoverability through their API marketplace.
More about Mashape: https://www.mashape.com/

Microsoft’s Azure API Management

Microsoft’s Azure API Management became available to the public rather recently. You can provide and manage an API, get developer portals, documentation, security management, performance management, statistics and analytics. They have on-premises and cloud versions (not limited to the Azure cloud).
More about Azure API Management: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/api-management/

Apigee

Apigee provides a range of services, from free API tools for developers to large API management solutions for enterprises. Their solution can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises. They offer API analytics, developer portal, transformations, traffic and performance management. Apigee seems to provide the richest API analytics platform compared to other companies. In mid-2014, they launched the new version of their big data predictive analytics platform.
More about Apigee: http://apigee.com/

Mashery

Mashery is an Intel company since 2013. They provide an all-around API management solution that supports SaaS and on-premises implementations as well as a few hybrid oriented ones. Their services cover from API technology and infrastructure to business strategy.
More about Mashery: http://www.mashery.com/api-management

CA Layer7

Layer7’s API Management is heavily enterprise directed. They offer on-premises and cloud deployment solutions. Their services range from integration, security management, performance management, mobile API gateways, mobile optimization and developer portals. CA’s support for mobile applications is considered to be more feature reached compared to other solutions.
More about CA: http://www.ca.com/

IBM API Management

IBM’s solution comes either as on-premise or cloud hosted. It covers a lot of the API management needs of a large company and it is considered a much user-friendly platform.
More about IBM API Management: https://apim.ibmcloud.com

Oracle SOA

Oracle provides an API Management solution that consists of its API gateway and SOA suite. The API gateway is used for securing and managing APIs and as a first line of defense in SOA environments.
More about Oracle SOA: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/soa/api-management/overview/index.html

MuleSoft

MuleSoft’s solutions is based on open source technology. They offer easy API design, advanced integration and testing features. It is widely used and they also work a lot with developer communities.
More about Mulesoft: http://www.mulesoft.com/

Akana (formely SOA Software)

They provide a unified Enterprise level API management and SOA Governance solution. It can be implemented on-premises or in the cloud. They offer a horizontal solution from design and building an API to policies, security and lifecycle management.
More about SOA Software: https://www.soa.com/solution/api-management

Axway

They offer an API Gateway that provides everything you need to develop, integrate and manage APIs. They provide security management and of course an API Portal for developers and partners.
More about Axway: http://www.axway.com/en/enterprise-solutions/api-management

WSO2

WSO2 is considered the most complete open source solution today. It covers API integration, management, identity and mobile. It supports public, private clouds, and hybrid implementations. WSO2 follows an open development process, where customers can provide input.
More about WSO2: http://wso2.com/

ApiAxle

It is an open source API management and analytics solution. It is a proxy that sits in front of your API and manages caching, security, performance and traffic. As an open source project, you may contribute to its code base.
More about ApiAxle: http://www.exiconglobal.com/apiaxle/

Epilogue

Not all companies launch API programs and not all API programs have the same goals. Some APIs are used as a revenue model or part of a product or service, others are free. Certain APIs are used to provide access and information to an ecosystem of companies. As the requirements vary, the tools diversify. So choose your API strategy and pickup the right tool.

Which are your favourite tools? Let us know and shape the future of developer economics. Take the survey.

HTML5 is perceived as a lower quality platform, mainly because of performance. This comes both as a result of survey data, as well as developer interviews. Yet, industry experts claim the problem is lack of tools. So what is the HTML5 really missing, performance or tools?

In April 2013 VisionMobile asked mobile app developers what stops them from using HTML5. 46% answered “Performance issues”, followed by 37% who said “Lack of APIs” (sample size: 1,518 developers).

We spoke to developers about their views on HTML5 performance. Apostolos Papadopoulos, author of 4sqwifi, a highly acclaimed public WiFi password app, noted “Quality and user experience is top priority for us. Therefore, we prefer going with a Native API”. It’s a common practice for developers to go native for better performance and user experience. But user experience, meaning following the behavioural conventions of the native platform, is a different story and HTML5 can’t help much. Developers can try to imitate but for a truly native UX they have to use Native SDKs; unless we are talking of Firefox OS or the long-awaited Tizen.

Ciprian Borodesku, CEO of Web Crumbz, added “From a business standpoint, there’s a lot of education needed for the acceptance of HTML5. There’s a gap between what we developers can provide and what the clients think we can provide”. The perception of HTML5 being a less capable platform is also common amongst people who commission apps.

Experts point to a tools gap

As part of our How can HTML5 compete with Native? report, VisionMobile conducted 32 interviews with industry experts, from Miško Hevery (author of Angular.js) to Max Firtman (author of “Programming the Mobile Web & jQuery Mobile” published by O’reilly) and Peter-Paul Koch (author of Quirksmode).

It came as a surprise when Robert Shilston, director of FT labs, champion of HTML5 apps, noted that “the biggest issue for HTML5 is the maturity of tools”. He emphasized not performance, but tools, as the key HTML5 gap.

Ran Ben Aharon, head of front-end development of Everything.me, explained it in more colour: “Hearing Mark Zuckerberg denounce HTML5 made me angry at first, but then I looked at some data and realized that the main reason was not performance or APIs but the lack of memory management and debugging tools”.

Even though developers identify performance as the #1 problem of HTML5, a number of experts claim the actual challenge is tools. There’s no contradiction here, performance and tools are related. How can you improve an app, if you can’t measure it? How can you fix a bug, if you can’t replicate it?

HTML5 is like a car without a dashboard

[tweetable]Tools are to HTML5 what a dashboard is to a car[/tweetable]. You can’t run at high speed without knowing how fast the engine runs or you might end up totalling the engine. Likewise, you can’t produce fast HTML5 apps if you don’t have quality debugging and profiling tools.

With HTML5, coding and debugging are two separate processes. There is no self-contained IDE here. Developers code on the editor (e.g. vim or sublime) and debug on the browser, i.e. using Chrome developer tools. But debugging tools are difficult to master and they require a thorough knowledge of the underlying technology, e.g. what is a reflow, how does the garbage collector work, how is a memory leak created.

Louis Stowasser, author of CraftyJS noted “it would be great to have something like YSlow for game developers”. Why pick YSlow and not Chrome developer tools? Well, because the former offers insights on what to fix rather than data requiring interpretation.

Moreover, each browser has its own set of debugging tools. As a result, [tweetable]developers need to become familiar with at least 4 different environments to match the most popular browsers[/tweetable] of the market. And though it’s generally true that these tools look alike, it’s the little bits and pieces that make the difference.

Patrick H. Lauke, former product manager at Opera Software, highlighted the fragmentation of the browser debugging tools by commenting on a W3C public discussion board about our research: “Opera Dragonfly was the first to offer remote debugging and proposed a unified protocol for debugging. Sadly, other browsers showed very little interest and instead went their own separate ways to build something similar but different”. This also touches on the browser politics issue, due to be the subject of another blog post.

Better tools are needed

HTML5, as far as performance is concerned, is adequate for most use cases. And tools like famo.us and Goo Engine provide a testament. The question is no longer *whether* HTML5 can produce quality apps, but *how* easy it is to create quality web apps. What the HTML5 platform desperately needs is easy-to-use debugging and profiling tools.

With the right tools we could see external debugging tools hooking to multiple browsers and even apps able to profile themselves via standard debug APIs.

Web development attracts millions of developers who are new to software engineering because of the learning curve; it’s very easy to get started. The complexity gap between building basic sites and single page web apps (SPAs) is too big of a leap for many to jump over. Improved tool usability is one of the best ways to bridge that gap while also increasing productivity for those already building complex web apps.

What other improvements do you think are needed in HTML5? Download our research and participate in the discussion.