#APIFriday Live Edition: What you missed at UI5con

Thanks to everyone who attended my #APIFriday Live Edition session last Friday at UI5Con in Frankfurt. We had great attendance and a lot of excitement from the community. My Twitter feed was very popular during and after the event of people encouraging their coworkers and friends to participate, which I am super excited about!

Something that came up towards the end of the talk is that a lot of people still don’t know about the SAP API Business Hub. This is a central catalog for SAP APIs from a bunch of SAP Products. Small product push: if you haven’t been to api.sap.com, take a couple minutes to explore it. And if you have some more time, check out my tutorial series (recap blog) about how to get started using the API Hub. It is a great repository of the available SAP APIs and their different endpoints and methods. If you aren’t using an OData API from SAP, you probably didn’t know there is one available to you! So take a couple minutes and check it out. You won’t regret it.

(note: the crowd size grew (!) after I took this picture, which everyone was laughing at me for taking)

Some quick Q&A recap if you missed it:

• Destinations in your SAP Cloud Platform are a great resource to deal with CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing) and basic authentication (avoids hard coding your token into your AJAX call).
• The SAP API Management tool can help with encryption of keys so someone can’t do an inspect on your app using the developer tools available in most browsers and see your auth tokens. More to come from me on this tool.
• The API Hub (api.sap.com) is a resource every SAP (or non-SAP) developer should know about!

My hope was to show you all how easy it is to get started using an API in your application and how it can make adding new features even easier. With the use of the Google Maps JS Library, we can add more detail to maps in 1 or 2 lines of code. With an AJAX call or an OData service, we now have access to data that we can easily bind to our view to make it more detail rich. APIs open up worlds of possibilities and capabilities to us in a matter of minutes! They prevent us from re-inventing a wheel, and APIs can help reduce overhead costs such as backend infrastructure and maintenance. If you haven’t worked with APIs before, I would recommend looking at the API Hub or Slack as they have integrate testing sandboxes to try out the API.

I hope you continue to follow along with my #APIFriday series and I am looking forward to highlighting some community API apps in the future!

I thought I would include a picture of pretzels since I think I ate a whole tray as my colleague Jonathan Baker pointed out 🙂