Monday, July 7, 2014

Monday Morning - let's talk tech: Service First, Apps Second

In the service oriented world cloud computing lives in, it behooves us to think in terms of the interface first, the resultant apps, second.

For example, think of a database you want to share with thousands of users. Who knows how individuals might want to access that data? How will you manage fine-grained permissions? Lightweight business logic, perhaps tied to an enterprise authentication solution such as LDAP, provides one path. One may also benefit from performance, as frequently accessed data could be cached. As “consumed” data flows through a web services layer, it is desirable to have fine-grained access control and analytics of the consumption of said services — and who doesn’t love a dashboard view of utilization?

The Bluedog approach is to think in terms of application programming interfaces (APIs), in the form of web services, so that organizations can open up legacy systems, improve efficiency and encourage others to tap the information resources already in use across the spectrum of IT assets. An API is a set of programming instructions and standards for accessing a software application. An example is the Google Maps API, which enables developers to embed Google Maps on a web page using a JavaScript interface. The Google Maps API is designed to work on mobile devices and desktop browsers, showing how flexible the approach can be.

The libraries in our software-as-a-service Workbench handle connectivity, access control, and search so our developers can focus on building a great user experience, whatever the platform (iPhone or iPad, browser, or even machine-to-machine).

No comments:

Post a Comment