Ten years ago, there may have been only a single application that talked directly to the database and spit out HTML; customer service, sales – most of the organizations I work with have been moving toward a design philosophy more like unix, where each application consists of a series of small tools stitched together. In web example above, that likely means a login service combines with webpages that call other services – like enter and update record. That allows the customer service team to write their own tools using the web, the command line, scheduled, or any other interface.<\/p>\n
Sound too good to be true, doesn’t it? It is true, but it comes at a cost. For example, I never defined a mechanism to manage the explosion of APIs that will result under this approach. Consider this: uncontrolled growth is one definition of cancer.
\nSince the rapid creation of APIs is not quite so deadly, I will call this the API Sprawl; I’ve seen it across every client that moved to web-services approach, typically two to four years into conversion.<\/p>\n