Forrester Blogs › Category: APIs

What Twitter's API Changes Mean For B2B Marketers And Vendors Of Social Marketing Tools

Posted by Zachary Reiss-Davis on the Marketing Leadership Professionals Blog on August 17, 2012

Zachary Reiss-Davis

While it has been covered in many other places across the Web (start with Marco Arment, then Ben Brooks), Twitter’s API changes today should worry any social marketers who use tools and technologies that interact with Twitter.

In Twitter’s announcement, they state that they are not going to penalize “Enterprise Clients” and vendors of “Social Analytics” — every quadrant but the top right of their visualization, below. However, Twitter did not clearly delineate lines between what is and is not acceptable.  To continue to grow, Twitter needs to encourage a robust and healthy ecosystem, which supports both marketers and users. In order to do that, Twitter must provide much clearer guidance about the long-term stability of its APIs and its support for businesses built on top of their data.  If this requires announcements of additional fees for data usage, that will be fine as long as the rules of the road are clearly laid out. 

Until Twitter does so, I expect the volume of new enterprise-ready startups centered on Twitter to reduce, and existing vendors will increase their focus on other platforms and communities as CEOs and boards of directors try to reduce their risk and exposure to future changes by Twitter.

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Canonical Information Models Play Important Role In API Layers, Increasing Service Reuse

Posted by Mike Gilpin on the Application Development & Delivery Professionals Blog on May 29, 2012

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Mike Gilpin

I attended the third annual Canonical Model Management Forum, May 14-15, 2012, hosted by DigitalML at the hip Washington Plaza Hotel again this year. I saw even more signs than last year that canonical models are key to API layers that many firms are building to promote integration. But first, let me share some data from Forrester’s last survey on canonical modeling adoption that I presented at the forum:

As our data shows, this practice is becoming increasingly widespread in firms publishing services that deliver information. Some of the trends I highlighted in last year’s forum post are even more evident this year, such as canonical models’ increasing use in data access layers, as I depicted with this slide:

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Zero Trust Identity: Go From "Identity-As-A-Service" To "IAM-As-An-API"

Posted by Eve Maler on the Security & Risk Professionals Blog on April 17, 2012

Eve Maler

I just love the theme of our upcoming Forrester Security Forum (Las Vegas in May, and Paris in June -- check out Laura Koetzle's definitive blog post). Leapfrog Your Global Competition. Rethink Security; Run At The Threat. There's never been a better time to take a deep breath and rethink how security can contribute to business savvy and agility. The "Zero Trust Identity" report I'd telegraphed in my previous post on API access control is now out, and it's consonant with this theme. I found that if enterprises want to be nimble and secure in getting value out of mobile, cloud, and consumerization trends, they're going to have to get over some bad "unextended enterprise" habits, such as tight coupling to authentication functions.

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Embracing The Open Web: The Technologies You Need To Know

Posted by John R. Rymer on the Application Development & Delivery Professionals Blog on January 24, 2012

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John R. Rymer

The open Web is a culture, a community — and a set of preferred technologies for Internet applications. While HTML5 is the best known of these technologies, the open Web also includes JavaScript (client and server), CSS3, Representational State Transfer (REST) application programming interfaces (APIs), and mobile frameworks such as jQuery Mobile. Together, these technologies comprise a new application platform for the Internet that will gradually replace today’s web platforms (HTML4, Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Simple Object Access Protocol [SOAP] web services, Java EE, and .NET) for most applications. Forrester recently published research outlining the open Web platform’s key components, their readiness, and how the platform is evolving.

Open Web developers tend to use a variation of the façade pattern for their applications but refine the pattern to focus on standard web formats and protocols and services delivered via the Web — so we refer to it as the open Web façade. Developers draw on three bodies of de jure and de facto standards to implement the open Web façade pattern:

  1. Client standards. Application clients based on a body of emerging standards collectively labeled HTML5.
  2. Service plane standards. A service plane that exposes interfaces using the REST pattern and resource-oriented architecture principles. These services are often called RESTful web services.
  3. Virtual infrastructure standards. A highly virtualized server tier (often a public cloud service) that is easy to deploy initial solutions to but that is also able to scale up or down on demand to meet surges in capacity.
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Can You Join The API Economy While Maintaining Top-Notch Security?

Posted by Eve Maler on the Security & Risk Professionals Blog on October 18, 2011

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Eve Maler

If anything exemplifies the extended enterprise, it's the notion of the "API economy": Unlocking value in your organization's unique data and services by publishing open APIs (application programming interfaces) for access by third parties. As Laura Koetzle notes, business leaders today are prioritizing growth above all -- and fostering a third-party developer ecosystem is becoming a great way to boost revenue. Best Buy, eBay, and USA Today are examples of companies with APIs and external developer communities.

But, but, but...just how secure is an open API? Especially if you, the security professional, can't fully control these external developers' actions? This is where it gets exciting, because security and identity-based access control are enablers of these new business opportunities. After all, an API of this sort is essentially a digital product whose use must be metered.

Many organizations in this position are turning to the OAuth technology to solve a host of security challenges that arise from opening up APIs. I'm excited to be bringing the latest in OAuth business cases, adoption news, and recommendations to my Forrester Security Forum track session on "Securing And Identity-Enabling Monster Mashups." Hope to see you at the Forum November 9-10 in Miami!

(Got a great API security story, or maybe some questions? Don't wait till November; feel free to share in a comment here, or ping me on Twitter using the #FSF11 hashtag.)

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