Programme

The independent API Community Belgium is there to gather the API enthusiasts in Belgium to share API knowledge, experiences, emerging trends and best practices in API design, development, discovery, consumption, and management. In this talkshow, Wout Lagae en Pieter de Rycke, initiators of the API Community Belgium, will share the most recurring questions and topics that are discussed within this community.

Organisations often want to increase their API maturity to be able to realise their strategic objectives. This is not such an easy assignment because you need to change the daily behaviour and thinking of your organisation. We believe you need to increase maturity by using a step-by-step approach. Each step has its role in increasing the maturity in your organisation. This approach is translated into six stages. In this talkshow, we explain the different stages of the model and show how we have applied this at the customers of I8C, Archers, Integration Designers and Integration.team.

At Smals, our goal is to support a plethora of government agencies and to render administration more efficient. APIs play a central role in the exchange of data and the automation of business workflows, both within and between our different clients, and even with private sector stakeholders. The goal is typically not to monetize our work, but to minimize public expenditure. For many years now, software reuse has been a central tenet to this end, and APIs its basic building blocks. In practice, however, reuse would be impossible without a disciplined API management. In this presentation, we will demonstrate our journey towards the increased adoption and maturity of API governance among government stakeholders using a standards based, inclusive, and bottom-up approach, and give a brief overview of our current challenges.

What does it mean to consolidate your API strategy and establish a productive and thriving API landscape? It means to understand the main value of APIs and how to make sure that this value is realized. We look at two different ways how API value can be defined and nurtured: The short game is to look at APIs as a more effective way to support the decentralized needs that are needed for todays digital value chains. The long game is to look at APIs as the drivers of change in the organization: By exposing all capabilities in an open way, the true challenges of digital transformation can be better met. Establishing and evolving an open API platform can support both of these API value propositions, and we will look at the essential factors of such a platform in order for it to deliver on the promise of API value.

In this session, Jeroen Wanten will share his experiences  with many different API Management Platforms, based on his work as an integration architect at mid-size and larger enterprises.

Jeroen gives you inside information and feedback on some of the platform leaders defined by Gartner.

Brought to you by Solita.

Securing your APIs, especially when they’re exposed to external consumers, is essential. It is however a tricky thing. API keys, JWT tokens, Oauth 2.0: there are so many different technologies and approaches available that it’s hard to figure out which one is the most suited for your particular needs, let alone how to implement it. In this session we’ll bring some clarity by demonstrating these challenges based on a real customer case and present our solution. We won’t just stick to architectural principles but will also illustrate how our solution can be implemented using specific technology.