Applications and APIs

ApiShare offers a way to organize and keep track of the resources of your API Ecosystem. To fully unlock its potential, you should understand its main resources and the connections between them. Namely: Applications and APIs.

These are the entities at the core of any company’s API governance program. This is why each of them has a dedicated Catalog in ApiShare. Applications and APIs are, in fact, the building blocks of any API Ecosystem and – while they can be seen as independent objects in their own right – they exist to complete each other.

As with brain cells, they are tightly related. To represent this, ApiShare introduces Subscriptions. Subscriptions are thus the third building block of an API ecosystem, an entity that embodies the connection between Applications and APIs.

The API

The API is definitely the most fundamental resource out of the three in our ecosystem, as the name ApiShare suggests. Important information is saved for each API, such as its authentication flow, deprecation dates, links to the documentation, tags and categories, OpenAPI Definition and much more.

ApiShare enhances the governance process of this resource by handling its Lifecycle. Starting from its birth, it passes through an approval journey that finally brings it live, ready to be found in the Catalog and used, until it is eventually deprecated and retired.

The Application

ApiShare manages applications in a very similar way to APIs. They also have their own lifecycle, as well as their own Catalog page, however their role is very different.
An application can be a Provider of an API, when it implements the logic that the API exposes to the clients, or it can be a Consumer of an API, when it has the role of the client making requests. An application, of course, may also have both roles at the same time, since an application can Consume APIs with the purpose of producing some APIs of its own.

The Subscription

The Subscription acts as a contract that defines the relationship between a Consumer Application and an API. Therefore, a Subscription is created whenever an Application wants to be the Consumer of an API, which is in turn provided by another Application.

An Application can consume multiple APIs provided by other Applications. For each such relationship there will be a dedicated Subscription. Keep in mind that an Application may also provide multiple APIs at the same time.

 

And that’s it!

Now you that you know which the main entities in ApiShare are, do check our other articles to find out more about how ApiShare works, and do not hesitate to contact our team if you want an in-depth preview of how ApiShare handles APIs, Applications, Subscriptions, and more.