MuleSoft has released the next major release of their Anypoint Platform, which features collaboration capabilities that enable the creation, saving, discovery, reuse of APIs and other integration assets within the platform.
Some of the highlights of this release, called "Crowd", include:
- A new Anypoint Design Center to save and self-serve IT assets
- Guided flow design: depending on the action user takes, the intellisense of the platform will suggest approaches, ensuring best practices when designing APIs.
- Native collaboration, no need to go to the Exchange website, search, download and import the asset into your design, Exchange is now integrated.
- New API design capabilities within Anypoint Design Center.
Within the Anypoint Platform users can design and publish API fragments, API specifications and also search the platform (through Anypoint Exchange) for fragments published by others to reuse in your own API design.
According to MuleSoft there is an IT delivery gap due to the demands placed on enterprises by the explosion of technologies, increasing the amount of work, making integration specialists, application developers and line-of-business do their own integration, often without guidance or collaboration with other teams. Crowd, by activating the discovery and reuse of assets, along with guided flow design, will guide IT teams to deliver better customer experience and reduce the time to market.
MuleSoft has also joined the Open API Initiative. Uri Sarid, MuleSoft CTO and creator of open RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML), will be representing MuleSoft in the Technical Developer Committee. MuleSoft will lend its support and industry expertise to OAI. As a starting point of this joint, MuleSoft made available as open source a new API tool called AMF (API Modeling Framework), which will provide interoperability where the user can parser and generate APIs specifications between OAI and RAML, further publishing the asset to Anypoint Exchange and making it reusable.
One thing to notice is that by joining the Open API Initiative, alongside with others API Specification, such as Apiary, MuleSoft is trying to avoid the mistakes of the past, where different API specifications took different paths, offering complementary perspectives of the same thing, reinventing the wheel, not making assets reusable, lacking collaboration.
