2018 – Another Big Year for APIs

2018 was another big year for the API (application programming interface) economy – the ProgrammableWeb directory, which tracks APIs, passed the 19,000-API mark in January of 2018 and currently sits at 20,653 on the last day of 2018. There has been an explosion in growth in the last 5 years, with more than 2,000 APIs being added every year to their directory.

Earlier this year I attended the annual Xero Developer Roadshow in Melbourne and this slide caught my attention (apologies for the resolution/quality):

Xero released their first API in 2007 – the first cloud accounting API – and now receive more than 450 million API calls each month! There was another slide showing the number of ASW Servers they deploy for handling these API calls, which from memory was in the hundreds but could have been in the thousands.

Gartner have been talking about the concept of an API economy for a number of years and that businesses should put APIs at the centre of their digital business platform. An API economy is an enabler for turning a business or organisation into a platform which is something we’ve seen with APIs like the Xero API, which now has 40,000 active developer partners and over 700 certified application partners.

2018 also saw FileMaker, Inc. ship the FileMaker Data API as part of FileMaker Server/Cloud 17 platform. This is the first REST API (Representational State Transfer) from FileMaker which makes connecting other applications and web services much easier. You can now choose your programming language of choice when connecting to the FileMaker Data API – you can even use a FileMaker client such as FileMaker Pro or FileMaker Go which we’ve done on a number of projects (see our earlier article if you’re wondering why you would do this).

We specialise in FileMaker integration here at Databuzz, which more often than not means working with APIs. We’re typically connecting FileMaker to another platform such as Xero for accounting integration or Shopify for ecommerce integration, allowing our customers to easily exchange information between different platforms and streamlining business workflows.

Looking back at the projects we’ve worked on in 2018 here’s a partial list of the APIs that we connected the FileMaker platform to over the last 12 months:

• Xero: accounting integration (see our fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) solution for more details)
• Twilio: voice, SMS/text and MMS messaging solutions
• Gravity Forms: download form entries from your website into FileMaker
• DocuSign: automate electronic document signing
• TinyPNG: compress PNG/JPEG files stored in FileMaker container fields
• eWay: credit card payment/tokenisation
• Moneris: credit card payment/tokenisation
• BPOINT: credit card payment/tokenisation
• Homepass: real estate data integration
• RP Data: real estate data integration
• Shopify: ecommerce integration (see out fmEcommerce Link (Shopify Edition) solution for more details)
• WooCommerce: ecommerce integration (see out fmEcommerce Link (WooCommerce Edition) solution for more details)
• MYOB AccountRight: accounting integration (see our fmAccounting Link (MYOB AccountRight Edition) for more details)
• WordPress: website content management integration
• FileMaker Admin API: FileMaker Server administration integration (currently in trial mode)
• MINDBODY: business management software for the health and wellness industries
• Magento: ecommerce integration
• Google Maps: creating mapping solutions based on FileMaker data
• fmSMS: our solution for sending/receiving SMS messages with FileMaker supports over 75 different SMS Gateways/APIs alone!

We already have a few projects lined up for 2019 which will see us working on some new APIs for the first time. Now that the FileMaker platform can easily integrate with APIs, both as a client and as a server, working on integration projects has never been easier.

If you would like to discuss integrating FileMaker with an API for your business please get in touch for a free initial consultation to discuss your requirements.