News

Oversubscribed Beta Pushes WSO2's API Manager Into General Availability

• By John K. Waters
• August 14, 2012

After more than 140 developers applied to join the beta test of WSO2's  new API Manager, the enterprise middleware maker has decided to make it generally available (GA).

The company is billing the now-GA product as the first 100 percent, open-source API management system to provide complete lifecycle governance of application programming interfaces, "from creating to publishing, deprecating, and retiring APIs."

With the release of this birth-to-death API governance and analysis tool/platform, the company aims to "democratize API management" with an affordable piece of software for controlling and managing the API lifecycle. The company has been working closely with IT architects and developers, said WSO2 co-founder and CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana, to "make it affordable to acquire the software, easy to control APIs and manage the API lifecycle, and simple to find and subscribe to APIs."

Users of the management system can publish both production and sandbox keys for APIs, making it easier for developers to conduct tests and for interactions with APIs can be managed through comments and ratings. Along with its governance features, API Manager provides tools for monitoring API use, performance and service-level-agreement (SLA) compliance. The system provides secure authorization of APIs using the OAuth 2.0 standard for key management.

API Manager is built on the same code base as the company's flagship Carbon enterprise middleware platform. Carbon is a service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework built on the OSGi specification, which defines an architecture for developing and deploying modular applications and libraries. Because the product is built on Carbon, the company says, it supports the easy expansion of such features as business activity monitoring (BAM).

The list of key features in this first release includes the API Store, a platform for creating Apple-App-Store-like marketplaces where internal users, customers, and partners can subscribe and consume APIs. This feature allows a company to create a "graphical experience" that includes "skins" for corporate or product branding. Users can browse the Store for APIs by provider, tag, or name, and register to the related developer community. API Store users will be able to subscribe APIs and manage their subscriptions on a per-application basis, and the IT organization will be able to manage subscriptions on a per-developer level.

"The online store is such a successful model that has been widely embraced by consumers," said WSO2 co-founder and CTO Paul Fremantle, in a statement. "It was an obvious step to extend it to developers. The kind of power and ease of use that our WSO2 API Store brings to the enterprise has the potential to radically change how people build out a B2B ecosystem."

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based WSO2 was founded by members of the Apache Software Foundation's Web services community, and its products are based on Apache technologies. The company's flagship offering is an open source enterprise SOA middleware stack "purpose-built as an integrated platform to support today's heterogeneous enterprise environments," the company says. The WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS) is based on Apache Axis2, and the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is based on Apache Synapse.

The new WSO2 API Manager can be downloaded now from the company Web site.