The Shifting API Landscape

ICYDK: I’ve been watching, and trying to move forward the API conversation across all business sectors for seven years now. I’m not a startup. I’m not an API service provider. I’m not steering an enterprise group. I’m not an investor. I’m a software architect and storyteller who saw the potential for leveraging web infrastructure to deliver data, content, media, and algorithms across the web, to our mobile phones, as well as the seemingly endless number of devices we are connecting to the Internet in our personal, professional, and industrial worlds. I’m not studying the landscape so I sell to it. I am studying the landscape so I can understand it. While most of my readers will not grasp that difference, it gives me a fundamentally different view of what is going on across the space.

In the last seven years I’ve had a focus on helping individuals at SMB, SME, enterprise, organizations, institutions, and government agencies understand what APIs are, and why they should be doing them. In 2017, I feel that mission becoming irrelevant based upon the shifting API landscape. As I work on my third API-first strategy for a top level federal agency in response to an RFI in recent months, prepare for an all week API workshop at Mutual of Omaha in Nebraska, and bookmark the job postings for API architect at almost every major bank in the US and UK, my cute little mission to help understand people understand what APIs are clearly needs to be retired. While there are plenty of people who still need to be educated what APIs are, and that they should be doing them, I’m going to leave it to the waves of other pundits, advocates, evangelists, and analysts to help onboard them. I’ve done my time. https://goo.gl/NEG1NT #DataIntegration #ML

Mule Application Development: Effective Caching

In any integration project, caching is a crucial part of the design. Certain data are very unlikely to change for a period of time. In those situations, we do not want to retrieve the data everytime from a data source, such as a database, file, etc.

Mule Anypoint Platform provides two key caching mechanisms. One is context registry, which basically is a Java HashMap inside the MuleContext object. We can use the registry to store and retrieve data. The other is cache scape, which stays inside a flow or sub-flow. When the system hits the component, it checks its cache. If it has the key, it will return the value. Otherwise, it will invoke the cache scope, which typically will retrieve data from data sources. For more details about the cache component, please refer to Mule documentation here. https://goo.gl/CKwzC2 #DataIntegration #ML