API Implementation

At Betka, we love a bit of Cloud.  Mmmm Mmmm, Cloud Cloud Cloud.  So tasty.  But a juicy bit of Software as a Service (SaaS) or a chewy morsel of Amazon Elastic Compute ain't nothin' if it's served without the appropriate condiment: leverage of the service's API.  Let us cook up a wholesome implementation for you. 

What you talkin' 'bout, Willis?

API stands for Application Programming Interface, and Wikipedia defines an API as 'a set of clearly defined methods of communication between various software components.' When talking about cloud services, an API allows you to programmatically interact with the service.  In other words, you can write some code that asks your cloud service to do something rather than having to log in and click on that function yourself.  The best cloud services have APIs that allow you to do anything and everything the service offers in the user interface via the API.  Sometimes you can do even more via the API than you can in the user interface!

A.. P... Why?

Nice cloud based employee performance management system you've got there!  Wait, what?  You're your HR staff are manually entering all your staff's names into the user interface manually?  That sucks.  And is expensive.  There'd be an API available for adding users, so why not write a little program to automatically sync the system with your HR database?  Cool.  Then how about we write a tool that goes and grabs the employee performance data and collates it with salary data in the HR database to create a report for the people managers at salary review time?  Very cool.

Let's do it!  Err... but how?

APIs are sweet, but they're only useful if your development platform understands the ones you want to use.  Writing the code to do this is known as implementing an API.  It can be pretty tricky, with a lot of detailed technical requirements defined by the cloud service provider that are often differ from other providers.  At Betka, we love implementing APIs and we're pretty darn good at it.  So we'd gladly assist you.  We offer basic implementations, which cover off tricky business like oAuth authentication and gives you a basic framework from which to build your own API calls for the service.  We also offer needs based implementations, where we sit down and work out which API calls you need for your project and implement those for you.  Or the final option is the works burger, where we implement the every API call your cloud service has defined, allowing you to create any automation you can think of.