“We’re all distributed systems people now.” #gluecon @argv0

— Michael Rose (@Xorlev) May 22, 2013

In fact, we always were, but conveniently forget that fact most of the time. Specifically, APIs, Cloud deployments, SAAS and “remote access to everything” make building systems incredibly hard because they are distributed – across organisations. The fact that building systems in which multiple components that we depend on are hosted in remote infrastructure owned and operated by others has been a reality for a good long while. However, the increasing adoption of APIs in particular, simply makes the issues that arise more acute – and we don’t talk about the enough. The theme came out strongly both in John Sheehan‘s Keynote on Runscope:

“Distributed is the new Default” for modern applications – “we’re building distributed systems by not acting like it” @johnsheehan #gluecon

— Steven Willmott (@njyx) May 22, 2013

and in Andy Gross‘s:

GlueCon 2013 Notes: The Free Lunch Is Over, Again – Andy Gross, Chief Architect at Basho bit.ly/16Rt7vg

— Tony Karrer (@StartUpRoar) May 23, 2013

John’s talk covered the pain of working with multiple different external APIs – both at development time and at run-time. Each API fails in different ways and at different times – making even gaining insights as to what might be wrong hard to glean, particular with systems that need to run 24/7. Andy dug right in on the kind of testing needed to really validate that a distributed system such as the deployments Basho – “Concurrency is no longer enough – We are distributed Systems people now”.

The theme also came out in Talks from Netflix, Google and Parse – not only do internal systems (which may be distributed) need to be managed closely: there are now external systems which depend on these and others on these.

In a “distributed” world many things become harder: remote nodes cannot always be relied upon, clocks are not synchronized, small latencies between locations make many algorithms invalid or impossibly slow, many of the endpoints are managed by different organisations – meaning changes are often not coordinated or orchestrated.

All this warms ours hearts as an “old time” distributed systems folks – Internet Applications are becoming genuinely distributed across organisations. This creates growing pains – but also makes new types of application possible. People often ask “what’s the fundamental difference between SOA and APIs? The essence of the answer is, not technical – it is organisational:

APIs are typically designed for inter-organizational integration, SOA typically for intra-organizational.

Even though SOA solutions do get used for the former, this has almost always happened with strong assumptions on the human collaboration around the integration and sense of “shared ownership” of the resulting app – control of the resources involved. With the rapidly increasing number of API integration, this assumption is simply not there. Apps in an API world need to handle being truly distributed.

Vendors like ourselves and new companies such as Runscope, will hopefully start to make it easier for both sides of the API equation to take some of the pain out of providing and consuming APIs. Building genuinely functioning, stable apps across clouds is very hard and we have a long way to go – but we’re starting to recognize and address the pain points!

Huge congrats to Eric, Kim and the team for another great event!

3scale: API Management Solutions

Buildings account for almost 40% of the total energy use in the US; the Panoptix solution is all about increasing options for delivering better building efficiency.  The Panoptix platform is open and we offer APIs so our partners can offer their efficiency applications that take advantage of Panoptix data.

Interview with Jim Schwartz, director of strategic marketing for Johnson Controls, which focuses on emerging technologies and cloud based software deployment models. With extensive experience in high-tech marketing, product management and operations, Jim has held senior leadership positions with Microsoft, Cisco and several start-ups. 

Tell us more about Panoptix
Johnson Controls offers the Panoptix® Building Efficiency Platform to deliver lower energy and operating costs while maintaining occupant confort.  The Panoptix solution provides tools to review building and enterprise performance, pinpoint equipment that’s wasting energy, assess the effectiveness of retrofit projects, monitor and report on carbon emissions and much more–through applications developed by Johnson Controls and our partners.

What API(s) does Panoptix offer today?
The Panoptix API set let’s our partners access a wide range of building data collected by utility meters and building automation systems.  The data may be specific to an equipment type like an Air Handling Unit, or may be more general like overall energy use trends.  In all cases, our partners can access valuable data to deliver actionable insight to our joint customers.

The Panoptix API set is based on HTTPS requests and conforms to the design principles of REST; all requests are either HTTP GET or HTTP POST and return JSON responses. Partners can use any programming language to access the API, as long as the programming language can make HTTPS requests and parse JSON responses.

When did Panoptix realized that it needed an API?
In the envisioning stage of product development it was clear that traditional approaches to delivering building efficiency lacked a range of options for facility managers and owners, so they had to pick and choose among a range of point products. Johnson Controls realized that an open platform is necessary to meet our customer’s needs. By providing APIs to our partners so they can use Panoptix data in their products, we are able to quickly and efficiently meet customers’ needs.

What recommendations and tips would you give to a company planning to launch an API?
Simple and easily accessible APIs are the key to ensuring developers actually use them, and of course a developer community is important so that people can interact and learn from each other–and people in your organization.

Why and how are you using 3scale API Management Platform today?
3Scale helped us get our APIs in front of developers quickly and help us focus on our core business rather than spending time managing API transactions. We use 3Scale for developer and application on-boarding, access control & rate limits and the analytics and traffic monitoring.

What benefits have you seen/are you expecting from your API program?
With Panoptix Platform Services we have been able to rapidly expand our ecosystem of partner and ultimately better meet our customer’s needs for an end-to-end building efficiency.

What is your vision for your API?
Johnson Controls collects a broad range of building data and the range is expanding; by listening to customer and partner feedback we are rolling out additional APIs on a regular basis.

Johnson Controls is the global leader in building efficiency. WIth equipment, controls, software and workplace solutions, Johnson Controls creates healthy, productive environments, reduces energy consumption, reduces carbon emissions and promotes sustainability. 

3scale: API Management Solutions

Users of Truecaller can share their contacts and in return get access to the collaborative database of names and numbers. It is this unique data that Truecaller now has made available via their API.

A guest post by Truecaller, the world’s largest collaborative phone directory

The Truecaller API, powered by 3scale, makes it easy to connect a name to a phone number. This has previously not been a trivial problem – pre-paid phones and carriers unwilling or unable to share data are just some of the problems. Truecaller has solved this problem by crowd-sourcing. Users of Truecaller can share their contacts and in return get access to the collaborative database of names and numbers. It is this unique data that Truecaller now has made available via their API. The API makes it possible to search among over 600 million phone numbers worldwide.

The Modern Collaborative Phone Directory
Being able to attach a name to a phone number is very valuable. This is especially true in parts of the world that has not previously had a national phone directory for whatever reason, for example due to the popularity of pre-paid phones. Since the data is continuously being updated by the Truecaller community, the API is kept up to date and keep returning the latest and greatest information.

Reverse Number Lookup
The basic functionality of the API is to send in a phone number and get back some data about that phone number. The data Truecaller delivers are:

• Name – the name of the person attached to the phone number

• True score – indicating how popular the number is within the Truecaller phone number directory

• Spam score – indicating how likely the number is related to spam, i.e. telesales or robocalls

The Truecaller directory is built by the Truecaller community of users and those users who don’t like to be spammed with sales calls or automated messages. To avoid that, Truecaller’s data is used for these purposes, and it has opted not to make it possible to search for a persons number based on the persons name.

Get Started
Read more about the API at dev.truecaller.com. Get started with the Truecaller today by testing out the free option or request an account to get access to the full power of the API.

3scale: API Management Solutions

Getting content and services onto connected home devices, tapping into home infrastructure and creating a uniform experience is clearly. The panel covered a wide range of topics from integration with CE devices to business models and distribution.

Our take away from the panel was how key the interplay between device, app and API will be to create this uniform experience. While Apps are typically the element that gains the most attention for in-home scenarios, it’s really the combination of three things which will make the home environment genuinely smart:

• Apps – whether on a device with a screen or not: create a localized piece of functionality that the user experiences – as well as putting the relevant brand name front and center for the user.

• The increasing number of devices: are a carrier for these apps into the home – with Smart TVs in particular rapidly accelerating in adoption but many in-home gadgets such as Fridges and Kitchen appliance become first Wifi enabled and then becoming hackable.

• APIs: lastly APIs provide the underlying data and transaction layer that power these apps in doing their work. They also form the glue that enables a seamless user experience across multiple devices.

In many cases, the in-home experience already spans a multitude of devices from different manufacturers and for different family members – making for a rich but complex environment.

Many of 3scale customers have the potential use their APIs to power in home, personal and devices (from entertainment such as Musixmatch, through infrastructure management such as Johnson Controls and relevant life data such as Yummly and Nutritionix). As the home environment becomes more hackable, it will be natural for custom apps or data from these services to show up in the locations just where they are necessary – the kitchen home screen for nutrition information or a special projection to aid our singing in the shower.

During the panel we showed a graphic which is illustrative of the new opportunities opening up:

It’s also great to see hardware and software become merged with new technology such as the Philips Hue – which is now scriptable and can be connected to events in other cloud services via IFTTT. This means external events (emails arriving, sports scores, the weather and whatever else the user determines) – can be used to change the lighting in a room. While it’s still early in terms of people doing this, a lot of creative possibilities open up. It is also interesting to note that the architecture of the system necessarily means lights are controlled from a server by API – rather than purely locally in the home. While this may create issues (robustness / security), ultimately it also creates opportunities – the ability to keep extending the capability of the system even after bulbs are sold and the ability to keep connecting the app to more and more external sources.

Depending on a company’s focus on the market, there are different interesting trends in the space:

• Becoming a “platform” will be an imperative for most Companies wanting to get traction in the digital home: While there will be some large hardware / device players, it seems likely that there will be significant device fragmentation – leaving many companies the challenge of how to get onto these many devices in order to serve and connect the multiple and varied places their customers need them to be.

• Hardware and Device vendors should look to build their App/Partner ecosystems – and be hackable: many vendors for large devices such as Televisions already ship with significant ecosystems of Apps. It seems likely smaller and smaller devices will be connected and also that architectures will become more generic. While proprietary ecosystems have won the day to date, there is now increasing value in more generic platform capabilities – Ardunio, Raspberry Pi and the advent of in-home devices like Android Powered Ovens since they immediately make it easier for developers to create apps.

• Scripting Platforms reaching hardware will be a game changer: the IFTTT example shows how neatly hardware and software can play together and no doubt we’ll see similar hardware integrations from other integrators (IFTTT itself also lready has other devices available). It seems likely this trend will continue and consumers are likely to catch on quickly if the interfaces are right – changing physical space is so much more intuitive that moving bits.

Together these trends seem likely to make the modern home both more and more hackable and also more connected to the world of data and systems outside of it.

Thanks to Connections / CITA and everybody on the panel for a great discussion!

3scale: API Management Solutions

Our Taxi Content Hub is the place for reliable and competitively priced taxis and private rides across Europe and in New York. Soon also in other US main destinations and Asia. We enable innovative companies to create new door-to-door travel services and mobile offerings.

Interview with Tommi Holmgren, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Cabforce.

Tommi has an extensive online business background and has been working at Amadeus before founding Cabforce.

Tell us more about Cabforce
Cabforce was founded by a group of guys who had been traveling for business and experienced the pain of getting and paying trusted taxis while abroad. Our mission is to provide a flat-rate and secure pre-bookable private rides everywhere.

What API(s) does Cabforce offer today?
The core of our service is Cabforce Taxi Content Hub, which maintains the pricing and availability of taxi and private car content across the whole Cabforce network. It’s one source for searching for rates and making the bookings. And there’s an API for these things now available to developers and travel industry partners.

When did Cabforce realized that it needed an API?
There’s a lot of hype around door-to-door travel search. To be fully capable of providing user awesome travel search results, not just from airport to airport, these companies will need to plug in content from different sources including flights, trains, ferries and ground transportation. We saw an opportunity in providing the taxi and private car content to this need. API is a natural solution for us, and it also allows us to serve partners like mobile app developers who seek to enrich their apps targeted to travelers with our content.

API is a natural solution for us, and it also allows us to serve partners like mobile app developers.

What recommendations and tips would you give to a company planning to launch an API?
We’ve been working on our platform for quite some while already with custom integrations to external systems. This gave us very good idea of the true need within the API users. It was also very beneficial for us to benchmark the other travel vertical APIs, such as train, flight and hotel to make sure we make the use of our API easy and familiar for our partners.

Why and how are you using 3scale API Management Platform today?
We needed to build our API for scalability and want to control different API plans from the beginning. We follow the ideology of not implementing anything outside of our core platform functionalities, but instead use best available services and solutions in the market to do the job.

What benefits have you seen/ are you expecting from your API program?
We’ve been receiving a lot of interest from partners after launch of our API, and the first adopters are now integrating with us already. For us, it gives us possibility to further improve our core platform instead of spending excess time working with individual point of sales integrations. We believe this will make us grow much faster!

What is your vision for your API?
Our vision is to become the biggest aggregator of taxi and private rides globally. For this to happen, we need to be able to effectively distribute our content anywhere through simple and easy to use API.

Cabforce’s Taxi Content Hub is the place for reliable and competitively priced taxis and private rides across Europe and in New York. Soon also in other US main destinations and Asia. Cabforce API enables innovative companies to create new door-to-door travel services and mobile offerings.

3scale: API Management Solutions

As a developer, getting the most out of your infrastructure is close to your heart and Kii’s APIs are one of the comprehensive out there for Mobile Application Development (check out their platform here) – and some 3scale technology under the covers makes it even more awesome.

Kii also has a unique long term on it’s ecosystem and includes a VC fund to enable fledgling apps build and scale to reach large numbers of customers. However, rather than fighting through pitches there’s now an even more direct way to get support for your app which is to enter the new ChallengePost powered

Kii Cloud Challenge

The prizes total $50,000 in cash, travel and credits in various categories. There are 3 months to complete and launch your app, so plenty of time to do something awesome.

While hackathons with prizes are becoming more commonplace, it’s great to see one which takes a long term view – something with a longer time horizon to build a great app and a prize structure to help the app take off and succeed!

If you’re promoting your API, also check out challengepost as a great way to run contests.

3scale: API Management Solutions

The last 10 days have seen an impressive amount of change in the API space with Mashery and Layer7 both getting acquired, Mulesoft acquiring ProgrammableWeb from Alcatel Lucent and also our own announcement of $4.2 Million of investment. The moves are exciting and show that APIs are now becoming increasingly important to many businesses.

Some great takes are already emerging on what it means for the space as a whole – see here, here and here and we figured we’d add some perspectives too. In addition to excitement about the space and great feedback we’ve had we also a had direct questions which we can happily answers! In particular, we had a couple of people already asked:

So given the acquisitions will you be raising your prices and changing your product?

The answers? Happily – No and No!

In our view it’s still very early in terms of the adoption of APIs and there is a huge amount for everybody to learn. There will always be competing solutions of many types and that’s a great thing for the customer. We’re committed to always supporting a free forever version of the product and always trying to deliver best, most cost effective solutions right into enterprise grade. We’re also committed to making API management technology as deployable as possible in many different scenarios – so no change there.

At the API Strategy and Practice conference in New York in February (if you weren’t able to attend – check out the videos now coming online – there are some fantastic talks(*)), what struck us most was the amazing array of technical approaches taken. The field is still nascent and as APIs get to scale, meet new use-cases, address varied audiences and see other diversity, there is a massive amount to learn (check out Stripe on versioning, Netflix on Scaling rest [or not] and many others for example). A vendor like ourselves works to provide the best tools and we’ll keep doing so, but we have a lot of interesting ground to cover!

As the number of APIs climbs into the 100′s of thousands and millions there will also be new challenges – service descriptions will become more important, as will trust associated with endpoints, search and automating consumption of endpoints. So we’re looking forward to these.

We’re seeing APIs emerging in spaces as diverse as building management, transport, in-home robotics, healthcare, high street retail, communication, social media, content and much more. Each space is a little different but the fundamental idea is the same: provide uniform, flexible interfaces to the core drivers of business – be it delivering content, controlling thermostats of filing prescriptions.

(*) Also see the twitter feed for the latest videos.

Broad adoption of APIs

So as stated at the beginning, we’re excited for the future – we’ll be publishing more on the plans we have for continual improvement of our products and new offerings. However, you can count on us to keep trying to push boundaries to enable broader API adoption. In so many cases we’re already seeing APIs provide new opportunities for innovation, new revenue and cost savings. We’re confident that enabling broader adoption and encouraging take up will unlock opportunities for many and help move the web forward as whole.

While it’s hard to predict how quickly API adoption will progress, many estimates already indicate there are as many as 50-100,000 APIs out on the web in various forms – many times the number declared as public in directories such as ProgrammableWeb. Incoming requests to 3scale for services also grow significantly each and every month – so we’re not expecting growth to slow down any time soon!

The API Ecosystem

In addition to management vendors such as ourselves, Mashery, Apigee and Layer7 there are also many other aspects to APIs growing healthily which we hope will continue. There are marketplaces such as Mashape, documentation tools such as Apiary, open source proxies such as APIAxle, Web Development environments such as Webshell, scripting environments such as IFTTT, Rules.io and many others.

Also and perhaps most importantly, critical to the API Ecosystem has been the part Programmable Web and in particular John Musser have played in telling the story of APIs, building the goto directory of APIs and charting progress. It’s difficult to overstake the importance of ProgrammableWeb for the API space, in many ways ProgrammableWeb “Made the API Space a Space”.

That’s why the Mulesoft acquisition of ProgrammableWeb this week is a critically important more – no doubt Mulesoft has great plans for ProgrammableWeb and we look forward to seeing things evolve. Hopefully ProgrammableWeb will keep being a valuable, neutral, goto place and we’re exciting about how all the different parts of the API world will co-evolve over time!

Looking ahead

So we’re looking forward to many good things to come and friendly competition in the field + innovations all around! Try out 3scale (it’s free) and tell us what we should be doing to move forward!

Alss, we’ve nnounced the next edition of the APIStrat conference on the 23-25th October, 2013 in San Francisco – follow @apistrat for more details soon!

Looking forward to an exciting and eye opening year!

Related Articles

• “After Last Couple of Weeks, It’s Clear There Is Big Opportunity In The API Space”, Kin Lane.

• “The New API Gold Rush”, Brian Proffitt.

• “More consolidation in the API Economy”, Craig Burton, Kuppinger Cole

• “APIs are Eating the World”, Greg Sands – Costanoa Venture Capital

• “Why the App Economy Isn’t the App Economy, But the API Economy”, Steven Willmott / PandoDaily

• “The Death of the Web Page”, Steven Willmott / PandoDaily

3scale: API Management Solutions

It’s been a big day for us at 3scale with the announcement of our new $4.2 Million investment from Javelin Venture Partners and Costanoa VC! Those that know the company will be aware that we founded the company to help people open up APIs and create a whole new world of opportunities. This is something we’ve stuck to from then on and the new funding will provide an amazing huge boost to achieving that!

Before talking about what new heights we plan to reach though :), … we wanted to say a HUGE THANK YOU!

Firstly, to our new investors Javelin and Costanoa – Noah Doyle of Javelin will be joining the 3scale board and his experience plus that of Greg Sands from Costanoa will be huge boost to the wise thinking we can do. We’re looking forward to great progress with these new smarts on board! It is always a leap for a fund to make an investment so we’re honoured by the confidence being put in us – especially in a new space such as this!

More than that though, we want to thank everybody who has supported us along the way including our seed investors: Inveready Seed Capital, Tola Capital, Piton Capital and Hard Yaka, as well as government entities ENISA, CDTI and Invertec – Not to mention our Friends and Family investors! Seed stage capital doesn’t normally make the “splashy” headlines as a Series A does, but it’s critical for companies to get working and doing things. So huge thanks and may they keep the seed deal economy going!

Just as important are our users and customers – without which 3scale certainly wouldn’t be here. Companies large and small put their trust in our infrastructure and we certainly work hard to repay. Feedback (good and bad!) has always been invaluable to us and we’ll continue to keep working on product and services to better and better fit needs. APIs are a new technology and there’s a lot to learn both on the operator side and the user side. We’re privileged to be part of some great API programs and play a small part in their success – we’re looking forward to much more of that! Also to add here are industry observers like Kin Lane at API Evangelist – who play a great part in figuring out where the sector is headed and keeping people thinking straight (and not least partnering to organise events like @apistrat!).

Finally, we want to shout out to the Barcelona Startup Ecosystem. Operating in Silicon Valley is one thing, but starting and running a company in Barcelona takes a whole other level of determination. There is little capital and its incredibly challenging to scale – yet there are awesome companies growing up and a thriving scene. As events like the JobFluent Job Fair show – the startup scene is alive and kicking. This T-shirt says it all: “F*ck the Crisis – Build a Startup!” :). 3scale has two centres of gravity – Barcelona and San Francisco, both of which we’re committed to and lucky to call home. We’re Looking forward to people swinging by to hang out with us at our new offices at 450 Townsend in San Francisco and the old ones at Napoles 187, in Barcelona!

We’re looking forward to next steps and thank you to all who have supported us!

3scale: API Management Solutions

SAN FRANCISO, CA – April 24, 2013 – 3scale (http://www.3scale.net), the San Francisco and Barcelona-based API Management solutions provider, today announced $4.2 million of new funding in a round from Javelin Venture Partners and Costanoa Venture Capital.

APIs are a key infrastructure component for online businesses – powering mobile applications, partnership programs and innovation. Increasingly, as many businesses become more software driven, having a well-managed API available to customers and partners is becoming key to success in the marketplace. The growth of the number of APIs is exponential and forecasted to reach into the millions over the next 5 years.

In order to meet this need, during the past two years 3scale has grown into one of the leading solution providers in the sector. The company’s API Management solution provides infrastructure to manage the technical and business operations required to run a successful API program simply and at scale.

In contrast to other solutions, 3scale’s flexible platform is immediate, self-service and no cost to adopt, enabling any size business to run an API program and scale from free entry-level services all the way to Enterprise grade APIs on a single platform. The solution platform lets businesses build a solid foundation for their API program and scale confidently to serving 10’s and 100’s of Millions of API transactions per day.

The 3scale API Management solution already powers APIs for over 200 customers serving over 85,000 Application Developers, with API traffic monitored and managed by 3scale more than doubling in the last 6 months. Customers range from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses and technology start-ups, including: Skype, FlightStats, Wine.com, 1WorldSync, SITA, PagesJaunes.fr (French YellowPages), FullContact and Yummly.

“As products and services we rely on for our daily lives—from travel info to e-commerce, thermostats to elevators—increasingly connect to internet applications through machine-to-machine interfaces, the need for robustly managed API’s becomes critical,” noted Noah Doyle, Managing Director of Javelin Venture Partners. “We are proud to lead this new round of funding for 3scale because it will bring high grade solutions to a wide market, which no provider has done before.”
The new investment will help broaden 3scale’s set of services and bring it to a global audience, enabling even more valuable APIs and API delivery by its customers.

More information about 3scale can be found at http://www.3scale.net/. The company is also looking to fill new positions in both its San Francisco and Barcelona offices.

About 3scale
Founded in 2007, 3scale provides a Plug & Play SaaS API Management platform and infrastructure enabling developers and companies to securely open, control, manage, operate and monetize their API to 3rd parties (e.g. developers, business partners, etc). 3scale’s API Management solution is flexible, secure and web scalable enabling the distribution of a company’s data, content or services to multiple devices or mobile/web applications as well as the productization of its APIs. For more information visit www.3scale.net

About Javelin Venture Partners
With $200 million under management, Javelin Venture Partners is an early stage venture capital firm specializing in technology-based start-ups that leverage key innovations to create scalable, high-growth companies. Javelin Venture Partners’ investment professionals are proven new-technology entrepreneurs who focus on identifying exceptional businesses and management teams, and helping them achieve great success. The firm operates with the culture of a start-up and with an emphasis on being a true partner to entrepreneurs. Javelin Ventures Partners is located in San Francisco, CA., but invests in start-ups throughout the world. For a list of active portfolio companies, or to submit a business plan, visit Javelin’s website: http://www.javelinvp.com.

About Costanoa Venture Capital
Costanoa Venture Capital is an early stage investor focused on cloud-based services solving real problems for businesses and consumers by leveraging data and analytics. The firm’s name originates from the first inhabitants of Silicon Valley, the Costanoans, and harkens back to the origins of entrepreneurship and venture capital in Silicon Valley. Costanoa provides early stage entrepreneurs with a combination of “right-sized” amounts of capital and value-added support from a high-quality institutional partner. Current investments include: Datalogix, DemandBase, Guardian Analytics, Inflection, Intacct, iSocket, Lex Machina, LinkSmart, Return Path, and Risk I/O. The firm is headquartered in Palo Alto, Ca. For more information, visit http://costanoavc.com/
read our blog and follow us @costanoavc and @gsands.

3scale: API Management Solutions

Flexibility, scalability and security are probably the main keywords we tried to keep in mind during the API development.

Interview with Vivien Genet, Senior Developer at Jamendo.

Tell us more about the development process of the Jamendo API
When we decided to redesign Jamendo, we quickly thought that the API should be a priority in our planning: first, because it is THE main way for Jamendo to live outside www.jamendo.com (on social networks, mobiles, etc.), and second, because the migration of existing applications (based on our previous API) will take some time.

To develop the new API, we have used the Zend framework (as for the website) but we made a sub-framework specifically for the API to make it easier to change.

The current online version is the beta version. Developers who have started to program the next version of the Android and iOS Jamendo applications have worked on the alpha release. It was very good training to fix major bugs and unappropriated methods. Now other developers around Jamendo have also begun to use the beta version. All returns should help us to consolidate our API quickly and release a final version soon.

For the developer interface & management, we have chosen 3scale, which provides a complete and easy-to-use set of tools. With the administrative interface, you manage all applications, developers accounts, statistics, plans, rate limits, proxy config, etc.
The integrated CMS allows you to create a personalized developer portal extremely quickly. It’s really time-saving.

Finally, our team has worked on the API according to the “agile” methodology for about 3 months.

What are the key components of your core API infrastructure?
Flexibility, scalability and security are probably the main keywords we tried to keep in mind during the API development.


Flexibility: Jamendo will evolve a lot in the coming years and our API must be able to follow the Jamendo evolutions without reconsidering it. So our API framework had to be really dynamic.


Scalability: our API is free to use and we want to be more and more accessible from any place at anytime, so we will encourage everybody to use it. That’s why good scalability is necessary to stay efficient.

Security: of course, the API must be secured with a strong authentication to access read & write methods. 3Scale is perfect for that because it proposes different types of authentications, and particularly the combination of a client ID and a client Secret with OAuth1/2 support.

What drove your choices in terms of technology and infrastructure?
Jamendo has already developed two APIs in the past but because we decided to redesign the entire Jamendo infrastructure, we needed a new API adapted to this new infrastructure.

The previous APIs allowed us to learn from our mistakes and this time we have chosen quite a different direction from the previous version.

It was so permissive that it was possible to use it almost like when you make a SQL query. You specified the selected fields, the joined tables, ordering, etc. It is very powerful but it generates problems because of the lack of control over the consumed resources.

On the other hand, we had no authentication system. So if an application consumed too many resources (for example, multiplying the joints), we could not easily identify this application.

Our new API is less permissive but offers more methods for retrieving the same information. The difference is that there is no longer the risk of overloads due to a bad query.

With 3scale, we also identify each developer that is using our API. Knowing who uses your API, how and for what purpose changes everything. I’m sure it will also help us to improve our API by observing which methods are heavily used and which methods are hardly used.

What proxy are you using for your API and why?
We already used NGINX for the Jamendo website, so we were happy to see that 3scale provide a very good NGINX integration. NGINX is known for its high performance, stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption.

What are the specificities of your API?
With the new API, it’s now possible to access some write methods. It allows you to access features such as “like,” “dislike,” “add track to favorites,” etc. Many others will be introduced later. 
These methods are protected by the OAuth2 protocol that is supported by 3scale. With OAuth2, an application can be connected to a Jamendo user account very easily and securely for this user.

How can developers get a better taste of what your API does
Our documentation is online (http://developer.jamendo.com/v3.0).

The next step is to integrate ActiveDocs that is provided by 3scale. ActiveDocs is really cool for developers to use because it’s the easiest way to test an API in a complete GUI.

Any roadmap/evolution plan that you can share with us?
- April 11: we launch a developer contest to celebrate our new API (go to http://developer.jamendo.com for more information.)

- Implement the 3scale ActiveDocs.

- Add several write methods in our API.

Jamendo is a music platform that offers artists the ability to promote, publish, and be paid for their music made available for download under Creative Commons licenses.

3scale: API Management Solutions