Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
To build a seamless API integration, you need to map data appropriately.
In other words, to create seamless cooperation between apps, you need to map the appropriate custom and standard data fields and objects from the endpoints your customers will be integrating to with your app.
Yet another key to building an effective integration is implementing eventing.
For example, do you want the workflow to fire when the user manually clicks a ‘sync’ button, automatically when some other action is completed, on a timer (i.e. nightly), or automatically in the background?
Authentication can be complex, and developers are forced to work within the framework of the APIs they’re integrating to.
If you’re building internal integrations, you’ll likely encounter easier to manage tokens, if they’re even necessary at all. But for productized integrations, you’ll have to manage your users’ credentials and tokens to third-party systems, which adds complexity and means more time and effort on your plate.
If you’re still getting the hang of web development and HTTP specification, you might find yourself often confused about which verbs to use and when.
Some developers learn that most applications on the internet are CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) applications and that the HTTP verbs match to these actions 1:1. POST is a Create, GET is a Read, PATCH (or PUT) is an Update, and DELETE is a Delete.
You (and your users) can’t map and transform data if you’re missing custom objects.
Discovery APIs are critical to understanding a target application’s unique (often customized) data structure and, consequently, building effective and accurate mappings and transformations that ensure data sync. Seamless connectivity is only possible when you account for custom objects from the target application.
"Without data, you're just another person with an opinion." - W. Edwards Deming
Over the past four years the annual State of API Integration report has become a resource for integration professionals to track trends, like the rise of GraphQL, and for product leaders to track key needs and drivers around APIs and integration. But that resource needs your input: please share your perspective in the 5th annual survey.