The API is the Computer?

There has been much talk around open standards, open software, big data and more recently open API’s. To me, an example of this is the Open Bank Project, “…empowers retail banks to dramatically enhance their online offering by opening transaction data to wider groups of people (including the public) and software applications via an open source powered API…”

Investors and innovation facilitators are now looking to back projects that facilitate the creation of API’s, in particular those which have the potential to change the way we do things for the better.  Large potential benefactors of this are social enterprise, education and health. I think that the UK Government is proving itself as a leader in this domain with its efforts around open data [http://data.gov.uk/] and its general design principles statement [https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples].

 I was reading an article today and the phrase “The API is the Computer” came to mind. I found no existing references to this after a quick search, but hey who knows.

This reminded me of the marketing tagline by Sun Microsystems some years back, “The network is the computer”. I am sure more recently someone must have quoted the “the cloud is the computer”.

I think that “the network is the computer”, “the cloud is the computer” and “the API is the computer” are all more or less the same thing. Each, a concept reflecting the current focus or perspective on technology evolution.

The idea that the API is the computer got me thinking. My colleagues and I have been working on a project named Landfall, we have already made this available as a product and have published some information on our website if you want to know more [http://www.navohpartners.com/tech_landfall]. Landfall is a generic application-building framework built upon open software and open standards. 

“The API is the computer” is one concept to me that makes Landfall standout from other generic frameworks. I believe that this API approach is innovation we have contributed to for which we have a working example of. We call this pattern Landfall is built on, Genoa.

 To test the effectiveness of this innovation, we have prototyped several different application models to access its effectiveness in time to implement, scaling, performance, flexibility and user experience. We have been very impressed; you are very welcome to contact us directly for more information on these.