APIs – Give it a REST
Back in the early 2000s I had a full head of shoulder length thick black hair. It was wonderful. Heady days indeed as an undergraduate enjoying lager at 99p a pint in the student union bar. Amongst many memories of my time as a Computer Science student one has always stuck in my mind and that was of the “Dilbert” cartoon. I’m sure many of you will be familiar with the creation https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-02-28
The cartoon in question was one of a number of pieces stuck up inside one of the labs. I never paid it too much attention at the time, but it evidently made an impression.
Fast forward nearly two decades, what’s Dilbert got to do with MFT? Well if you look in the cartoon, you can see the issue and I’m equally sure you can sympathise. Wally, Dilbert and the team have proposed a solution to any problem, build a database. It’s a very early 90s solution, but it resonates today if we transpose the Database with an application programming interface (API).
Daily I talk APIs and their uses with our customers new and existing. RESTful, SOAP, COM etc. It’s almost as though if a product has one then integration between A and B must use it. But like most things in life, there’s a time and place and API integration might always not be the best option.
API level communication can be forgiven for being the millennial snowflake compared to file-based communication often seen as the baby boomer. Here’s the point though, it’s not always the best choice.
Take the following examples, a .csv file containing 10,000 rows. The file itself is lightweight in terms of sizes, but from a data perspective it’s a real heavyweight. Moving this from a trading partner or to another system could require an API call for each row. That’s a lot of work… Moving it via SFTP then injecting via a SQL insert. A lot less overhead technically.
Think also of it commercially, platforms such as BOOMI or Mulesoft often charge per transaction! That’s going to quickly ramp up.
Batch runs, monthly processing, end of quarter type exports, all of these are the domain of the file transfer and long shall they remain!
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My colleagues and I would be more than happy to discuss your organisation’s security requirements with you.
Sam Malkin – Lead Solutions Architect, HANDD Business Solutions