To better understand the growing appeal of third-party API provider offerings, we will take a closer look at an exciting new entrant to this vibrant market — the California-based www.back4app.com. They have just released a new back4app API Hub that allows developers to create easily, deploy, host and share APIs completely free of charge. The rapidly increasing pace of API development and the growing recognition of the commercial advantages of easy access to third-party API resources provide the hub’s raison d’être. The interest it has generated clearly testifies to the stress API developers now place on reducing development cycle time and its associated expenses.
An Appealing Developer Community Concept
The API developer community concept that lies at the heart of the back4app API Hub is strikingly simple, but this straightforwardness certainly doesn’t detract anything from the added value it delivers. The platform provides a central repository of hosted and ready-to-use APIs for the web, mobile and IoT. API developers can make their own legacy APIs freely available to the rapid expanding back4app community (public). Back4app API Hub community members looking for ZIP code, messenger, calculator, and many other kinds of API, can search the repository for a suitable standardized API. The back4app API Hub Google discussion group (Developer Community) provides another valuable resource for developers to share their knowledge and experiences and help each other get the most out of the hub’s features.
Architecture for Maximum Performance
The back4app API Hub service architecture is specially designed to deliver maximum app performance while cutting out those annoying delays. It utilizes the Parse open source server with some important customizations developed in-house, for example, support for push notifications to app users, custom (cloud) coding and integration with social media. Parse APIs can, therefore, be seamlessly migrated to the back4app API Hub. In addition, full server redundancy and automatic backup routines ensure the security of all the data saved at back4app API Hub. Besides hosting public APIs, back4app also offers paid plans for developers who wish to keep their APIs private while still benefiting from its advanced storage, coding and integration features.
Performance-Enhancing and Cost-Saving
Developers will find it much easier to access standardized APIs through the back4app API Hub as opposed to taking on the challenges of integrating their apps with MailChimp, Facebook, twitter, stripe or similar services. The total costs of developing an API can easily exceed $10,000 so finding an appropriate free alternative immediately delivers major savings. Development team time savings are also worth a great deal when translated into monetary terms, not to mention the futility of employing developers to create features that are freely available online. Freed from the need to build their own complex frameworks developers can expect to achieve time savings of as much as 80% by making the most of the back4app API Hub’s rich array of free API resources.
The time the developers save should be reflected in lower development project costs, but other significant benefits are less obvious. Releasing developers from the need to work on a particular platform gives them a welcome additional flexibility in their own app creation. By releasing them from the need to devote their attention to avoidable development tasks (the “reinventing the wheel” we referred to earlier) they have much more time to devote to their essential mission — creating specific new features to enhance user experiences significantly and thus increase the appeal of their products.
As back4app API Hub continues to expand its APIs repository, its value to the developer community is constantly increasing. Through making the development of new apps so much easier and more economical and liberating developers from single platform dependencies, the back4app API Hub both reflects and reinforces the direction app development has been taking over the last couple of years. Allowing developers to devote much more time to product customization paves the way for API development to advance far beyond its current frontiers.
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Via: Back4app
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