Sunday, January 24, 2021

The API Layer for use by mobile applications.

 This is a continuation from the previous post:

  • Less chatty traffic between mobile applications and servers: Internet is extremely popular to allow any sized load and traffic for businesses anywhere. At first, this seems counter-intuitive towards highly responsive mobile applications but the migration of business applications from SOAP to REST to GraphQL has shown that mobile applications can do more with less.  GraphQL makes the frontend easier to develop, API versioning is no longer a problem, works with less data fetching, works well with serverless computing and driving down costs with being dynamic and flexible. 


  • Operational insights: Almost all IT businesses are concerned about ITOM such as with alerts and events, ITSM such as with incidents and service requests, and intelligence in operations. For example, the use of a web proxy helps differentiate between the traffic to the backend service, gather statistics and troubleshooting information on the clients – both mobile and desktop and to improve the security and offerings of the backend services. Similarly, IT data analytics software allow search and reporting on any kind of logs, metrics and events.  Together these empower the business to move fast on the demand areas for improvements. 


  • Allowing mobile applications and browsers to be quirky – Customers will never be happy with one stack or application. They are going to be fickle as choices explode but what will draw them back will be those applications that are mindful of their convenience and user experience.  Investing in a platform agnostic framework with security best practices such as from OWASP allows this convenience to them with no vulnerabilities or liabilities to the business. 


  • Organizing the APIs was only needed for stateful services while the stateless services allowed a namespace and nesting enabled, folder-like resource enumeration. Some techniques allow APIs to be discoverable from requests and responses. In all these cases, it is better to tailor it to the demand rather than the infrastructure or storage. Customers do not notice the difference between a data pipeline and a data storage but if we get the synchronization right, they will like their data, purchases and experiences to be carried across services. Performance is also improved when the focus on customer requirements is streamlined via dedicated services allow storage layer to take care of making it available globally and in near real time. 

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