CARTER MORGAN: Hi, I'm Carter Morgan,
and today I'll be talking to you about API-first application
development.
Whether you're adopting cloud services
or transitioning to a cloud infrastructure,
an API-first approach can help you manage the complexity
enveloping new applications.
Let's check out how.
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As organizations are increasingly
leveraging cloud technologies to build applications,
they implement processes to orchestrate new microservices
architectures, containerization, and continuous delivery.
But where do they even start when
developing a new application?
As the first step, they need to make sure
that the data that will be powering the application
is exposed as an API.
The developers responsible for the rest of the application
will be the first consumers of this API.
This ensures that the application
has the quality, predictability, and stability
to withstand web clients, mobile users, and other developer
consumers.
But although APIs help you unlock innovation,
in order to accelerate it, organizations
need to rethink their workforce to expand their application
development bandwidth.
Their traditional code-first approach
to application development sometimes
results in delays, rework, or disjointed experiences
for end users.
Additionally there is a large growing deficit
of developers in the world.
And as a result, IT organizations
are experiencing a huge backlog of software requests,
slow development cycles, and security challenges.
Because of this, organizations are
adopting no-code application development solutions along
with an API-first approach to empower their line of business
workers to build applications within the guardrails
prescribed by IT.
Why, you may ask?
Well, there are several benefits for choosing this approach.
First, by decoupling internal independencies
from the back end to the front end,
work can progress faster and independently.
Next, by showing only the necessary details
to the intended users via APIs, we
hide the complexity of connecting
to data and services.
And lastly, leveraging a no-code approach
allows companies to quickly create high-fidelity prototypes
and gather feedback for end users and iterate.
Now, let's talk a little bit about how you can leverage APIs
to build applications without coding
using Apigee and AppSheet.
You can easily connect to existing Apigee APIs
within Apigee, customize applications,
and deploy to mobile web and desktop interfaces
with the click of a button.
This shortens development timelines considerably.
Let's look at a quick demo of how this works.
We're going to start in the Apigee environment, where
we have an open API specification, an API
proxy that represents that spec, and an API product which
publishes the API proxy for client applications to consume.
Today, an app created in AppSheet will be our client.
In our Hipster products API proxy,
we can see a preflow policy that checks for an API key.
This helps to secure the API, as only
apps that have this secret key it can invoke the API.
Next, we can see the API product that
publishes the API for client applications
to use called Hipster Silver.
At the bottom of the API product definition,
we can see that an app has been registered already
for AppSheet.
And this is where we get the API key for our app.
Now we're going to switch personas.
We've been an Apigee API producer up until now.
In AppSheet, we will put on the hat
of the line of business user.
The first thing we'll do is create a data source
to point to our API in Apigee.
We'll click on + data source to add a new one.
We will name the data source Apigee Hipsters Demo
and select the Apigee type.
We enter the API key from Apigee and the URL
to the OpenAPI Spec.
And now we can validate and then authorize access
to create the data source.
Next, we can create an app.
We will go to the My Apps area.
AppSheet noticed that we don't have any apps yet,
so it's assuming we want to create one.
We do.
We'll use the Start from Your Own Data Option,
and the data will come from our Apigee API.
We'll call this app Hipsters App.
Now is when we get to choose the Apigee data source we created.
I'll select Apigee Hipsters Demo.
Let's select Products.
AppSheet just created the app for us.
And we can see the preview of the app in the pane
on the right already.
We need to just make a few adjustments.
I know that there's a picture of each product in the data,
but it's not showing up.
We'll change the picture data type to Image.
The product ID is kind of ugly.
Let's change that app to not show that,
and then it will show the product name first.
Let's save our changes.
Now the images are showing up and the product names
look great.
AppSheet helped us create our first app within a minute.
This is how you can easily leverage
Apigee API to build no-code applications with AppSheet.
In summary, the Apigee data source for AppSheet
gives you an easy way to leverage your existing APIs
to develop no-code applications within AppSheet.
By abstracting data and services as APIs,
and using these APIs to build applications without coding,
organizations can accelerate development timelines
considerably, and reduce their application backlogs.
Now it's your turn to try it out and get
started by clicking the links in the description below.
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