SmartBear Software announced Ready! API, an end-to-end platform for assisting development, testing and operations teams with the expanding API economy. Integrated, extensible and affordable, Ready! API is built around the core of the award winning, industry dominating SoapUI open source tool.
Fueled by the advent of service oriented architectures, mobile technologies and the Internet of Things, APIs are the backbone of most software applications today. Recent analyst predictions say that by 2016, the number of open APIs will hit 30,000. Today, there are more than 1.252 billion API requests made each hour. Social media APIs alone have grown by almost 300 percent since 2009.
To meet this staggering growth and load, APIs must be extremely reliable, scalable and secure even while release cycles are short and teams often have to test an API while still in development. A different approach to the development, testing and monitoring of APIs is required. First, the proliferation of non-integrated point tools for different phases of the API lifecycle has created a silo approach that complicates the development process, slows time to market, and reduces API quality. Second, so called enterprise API development frameworks have extracted exorbitant fees for such areas as service virtualization, placing key functionality out of reach for many developers. The API economy demands exactly the opposite dynamic where more high quality, integrated development, testing and monitoring tools are in the hands of millions of developers at an affordable price.
Ready! API is the industry’s first fully integrated, extensible and affordable platform to help teams build reliable, scalable and secure APIs. Using the industry’s leading open source application SoapUI as its core, Ready! API builds on years of development and customer feedback to create an API platform for the new API economy.
Ready! API is composed initially of four applications, each of which can be purchased separately. The four applications include:
- TestUI – for testing all Web services, including REST and SOAP APIs
- LoadUI – for load testing of APIs to ensure they meet high performance demands
- ServiceV – for creating, managing and sharing virtualized assets
- Secure – for conducting security scans against APIs
In addition, the Ready! API platform contains common services such as a plug-in manager, reporting engine and metrics, and script support for advanced users. These common services provide an extensible framework for added functionality and easy interoperability while building and testing APIs.
“We are expanding on the same model of affordable, yet extensible software that made SoapUI the leading API testing tool in the world,” said Ole Lensmar, CTO of SmartBear. “Ready! API provides a powerful set of individually purchased tools for API development, testing and monitoring in an integrated package. For areas such as service virtualization where applications have been priced out of reach for most developers, Ready! API provides a welcome relief and way to get the right tools into the hands of all developers.”
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