APIs are a hot topic, energetically debated by business people, IT managers, and developers alike. Most of the excitement in the public space is about open public APIs. To some degree, not having a public API today is like not having a website in the late 1990s. Yet for many enterprises, public APIs are really the least of their business concerns. More important concerns include building omni-channel solutions, innovating faster than the competition, becoming a mobile enterprise, or operating in a hybrid cloud environment.

Highly decentralized computing is the new normal for most organizations, and digital transformation (DX) initiatives are changing application architectures to event driven to support real-time and near-real-time response cycles. In this environment, enterprises are increasingly turning to messaging middleware to meet the combined requirements of complexity, speed, reliability, and security to connect the digital world of applications and data.

APIs are becoming the digital glue of today’s fast-moving marketplace. They allow you to quickly create interfaces with back-end systems and applications, and then share those interfaces with customers, partners and others to expand your organizations’ reach. Over the last 10 years, the web has essentially become a service-oriented platform, where information and functionality are available through an API. Many early APIs were written using SOAP. But now REST is the dominant development choice, and publication of REST APIs is on the rise.

Analyst whitepaper by Ovum: Hybrid Integration Platforms: Digital Business Calls for Integration Modernization and Greater Agility - Exploring the factors driving hybrid integration platform adoption.

Agile Integration Architecture: The Handbook for all of your lightweight integration needs. In this book you will learn:

• The impact of digital transformation on integration.
• Exploring agile integration architecture in detail.
• Moving forward with an agile integration architecture.

Agile Integration Methodology: Container-Based and Microservices-Aligned Lightweight Integration Runtimes - This paper explores the merits of agile integration architecture--a container-based, decentralized, and microservices-aligned approach for integration solutions that meets the demands of agility, scalability, and resilience required by digital transformation.