It’s been interesting working more with IT specialists as partners recently, who use Agilebase to deliver projects to customers. Their concerns are sometimes different to those of customers.

An important part of the value that partners add is in helping integrate Agilebase with a wider ecosystem of software. For example when building a stock control system, you may have mobile devices with barcode/QR scanners that can send data to the system when stock moves location, or is added/removed. Or on the marketing side, you might want to send email addresses to and from some mailing list software.

To be honest, the potential for integrations is almost unlimited. As systems grow, customers typically integrate with all other important systems they use, inside the business (like accounts packages) or outside (like feeds of weather, food safety alerts or bus timetables depending on the industry).

What partners want from us is an API system that’s

1. high performance, robust and secure – can handle lots of data reliably
2. quick and simple to configure
3. standards compliant – so they don’t have to learn new techniques

We already do very well on number 1, and as for 2 and 3 we have a REST API that uses JSON, which can be set up with one click, so the basics are there.

What we’re adding this month is the ability to generate OpenAPI specifications (formerly called Swagger) for each API you create with Agilebase.

For full details see the OpenAPI link above, but the main benefits are

• developers can see automatically generated documentation in a standard format they’re used to reading
• in some cases, third party software can use the machine-readable version of that documentation to automatically configure a connection to Agilebase

That means we have one of the best API systems to work with of any software. It’s fully documented and the new feature will be showing up in live systems in the next week or so.

Questions

We’re keen to get partners trying this out and have a few questions to kick off conversations. For example, what’s the easiest way to get hold of the OpenAPI specification? One option is to have a link from inside Agilebase: when you’re creating an API, you’ll be able to download the spec.

Another is to let third party systems request the specification – for that they also have to authenticate by providing the API’s Authorization key (you might not want to let the whole world know about your API)..

So if you’re a developer currently using the Agilebase API, or thinking of it, please get in touch! You can reach me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverkohll/ or on social media here: https://hachyderm.io/@okohll