APIs Decoded: Get What You Need From Open Platforms

By Scott Crowder
The announcement of available Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) by major vendors last year is a critical step toward technology innovation for the nonprofit sector. For many of those in the nonprofit technology arena, this is great news.

But, what exactly are some of the characteristics that make APIs enablers of innovation? How can APIs ensure that more solutions are developed to meet the growing and ever-changing needs of the nonprofit sector? Below are two basic characteristics of APIs that nonprofit managers and their technology advisors should look for in an open platform.

advertisement

1. Depth and breadth: APIs are designed to pull data from one application to another. The language of the API helps to determine how much data can be pulled at a time. Organizations looking to build applications from open platforms want and need to have access to a variety of data sets. If the data goes in, it should also be able to get out.

The language of the API can have a significant impact on the accessibility of data within an application. Two of the most common API languages are REST (Representational State Transfer) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). Each has its own benefits, but if data accessibility is important, SOAP is more powerful. REST-based APIs only transmits domain data whereas SOAP-based enables the exchange of data.

APIs written in SOAP enable large pieces of structured data to be transferred between applications. REST, although simpler in nature, is a just a way to explain how resources within an application are defined.

2. Usability: APIs that support embedded SQL queries, retrieval of multiple records, retrieval of records modified since a given date and filtering are a few examples of the way APIs and open platforms can and should be used. These capabilities go beyond the basic API, which only allows developers and applications to retrieve information about a known record, one record at a time.

These are two basic characteristics that nonprofit technologists should consider when evaluating a provider’s APIs. The depth, breadth, and usability are the elements that take the API from a list to an enabler of innovation.

There remains, however, one more key component. And that is a community of developers. An open platform is only good if it is being used. For scalability purposes, nonprofits should look at both the applications available and at the vendor’s development community.

Open platforms that are being used by multiple developers is a good way to determine the availability and overall effectiveness of an organization’s open platform. Open platforms are designed to foster innovation, and vendor’s that have an open platform need to encourage and foster a community of developers to continually create and offer innovative solutions that will meet the ever-changing demands of today and tomorrow’s nonprofits.

Scott Crowder is chief technology officer for Kintera in San Diego, Calif.

***

This article is from NPT TechnoBuzz, a publication of The NonProfit Times.

Subscribe to NPT TechnoBuzz or any of our other enewsletters and get the latest nonprofit news and stories delivered to your inbox..