Zend launches Apigility open-source API making project

SANTA CLARA, USA: Zend, the PHP Company, recently announced the launch of a new open-source project named Apigility. An opinionated API builder, the Apigility project has a goal of providing the world's easiest way to create and maintain high-quality API-based applications.

Key role of API-centric architecture

An API-based architecture is essential to the agile and mobile delivery goals of most development teams. Separating the presentation logic between the client and server provides the flexibility to support multiple form factors and integrate with 3rd parties.

APIs also future-proof the application such that capabilities can be easily reused at a later point, without having to refactor the entire system. By implementing this type of architecture, companies gain the flexibility and agility to best support the Web and mobile apps, in which the application's data and services are coming from multiple back-end systems and are consumed from multiple different front-end devices and form factors.

However, when compared to simple HTML-based apps, API-based apps are complex to design. They are a relatively new form of application architecture and so many best practices and standards are still emerging. Best practices for an API-centric design must address areas such as error handling and versioning, which are complicated and time consuming to do correctly.

"The entire Zend Framework project would not be where it is without the community around it," said Zend Framework Project Lead Matthew Weier O'Phinney.

"Having constant input from our community helps us think outside the box and accomplish much more than we could as a smaller team. Hundreds of developers already actively contribute to Zend Framework and we are excited to leverage that community to build momentum around tackling API-centric development-one of the most important focus areas for developers today."

The Apigility Project

Recognizing the challenges of building API-centric architectures, Zend has released Apigility, which provides a user interface for building APIs in a simple, standardized way, leveraging industry standards and best practices.

Developers can create an API and wire in any number of the nuts-and-bolts services that Apigility provides. This automates some decisions, making the coding process easier and less cumbersome.

Zend has selected recommended best practices for API creation in terms of authentication, error handling, filtering, validation and documentation. Apigility's role does not end with the creation of the API - it is designed to allow developers to evolve their APIs as requirements change - add, update or remove APIs - and has full support for versioning.

Some of Apigility's highlights will include error handling, validation, content negotiation and versioning.