If, as many in software development suggest, APIs are the future of Web services, then they’ll have to be held to the same standards of testing and monitoring as any other service.
SmartBear Software, which is building out its quality life-cycle software stack, is debuting today API Complete, which Ken Godskind, the company’s vice president of monitoring products, described as “a way to extend the quality initiative to production application stewardship.”
API Complete is composed of three elements: soapUI, a tool for testers and developers to build scenarios and scripts against what Godskind called “interfaceless interfaces”; loadUI, a plug-and-play environment for provisioning and setting up load tests for APIs; and AlertSite, which gives developers and operations technicians visibility into the quality of service of the assets.
“As APIs become the lingua franca for sharing data, each has to run at high tolerance, or it can crash the user experience,” he said.
Users can run API Complete remotely as well, to see what the APIs look like outside the firewall, Godskind added.
API Complete is the result of the SmartBear acquisitions of soapUI developer eviware, which is now the SmartBear Sweden business unit, and AlertSite. soapUI has been downloaded 3 million times and has an active user community, Godskind said. eviware, he said, had a vision for how to address the DevOps divide, and API Complete is the result of that vision.
“Seventy-five percent of the Fortune 500 companies will have public APIs that their business depends upon,” said Godskind. “APIs are the biggest things to run through IT since the Web itself.”
