Self-service API Composition Platform for Backend Automation
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Solution Overview
Problem
It is challenging for API creators to develop, distribute, and monetize APIs due to the complexity of backend development, database creation, and integration with billing systems, which often requires expert knowledge, making it difficult for casual developers to compose and sell APIs effectively.
Innovation Solution
An API development system that allows casual and professional developers to compose existing APIs using a user-friendly interface, automatically suggest API combinations based on usage patterns, and enable easy commercialization through online platforms, while also allowing the composition of APIs, data stores, and web service calls into a single API.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of manufacture
If API creators develop backend, create databases and implement function calls to expose APIs, then API functionality is achieved, but device complexity and difficulty of operation increase due to required expert knowledge
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a low-code platform as an intermediary between casual users and complex API backend systems. This platform provides visual composition tools, pre-built templates, and automated backend generation that mediate between the user's simple composition actions and the complex underlying infrastructure, eliminating the need for users to directly manage databases and server implementations.
Solution Approach 2:
The system enables self-service API creation by allowing users to compose APIs through intuitive visual interfaces without requiring manual backend development. The platform automatically generates, deploys, and manages the complex backend infrastructure, database schemas, and function calls based on user-composed API definitions, making the system serve itself rather than requiring expert manual configuration.
2Adaptability or versatility
If API creators integrate with distribution and billing systems, then commercialization is enabled, but ease of operation decreases due to required expert knowledge
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges distribution and billing functionality into the low-code platform itself, combining what were previously separate complex systems into a unified solution. The platform integrates marketplace listing, billing processing, subscription management, and revenue sharing into a single integrated environment, allowing users to commercialize APIs without needing to separately implement and manage these complex systems.
Solution Approach 2:
The low-code platform provides universal functionality that serves both technical API development and commercialization purposes. A single platform handles the entire lifecycle from API composition and backend generation to marketplace integration, billing, and distribution, making the system multi-functional and eliminating the need for separate expert systems for each function.
3Productivity
If users compose multiple APIs, data stores and web service calls into a single API, then productivity increases, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the complex composition task into manageable visual blocks and templates. Users compose APIs by assembling pre-defined functional modules, data store connections, and web service calls as discrete visual elements, breaking down the complexity into incremental steps rather than requiring monolithic design and implementation of the entire composed API.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements nesting by allowing APIs to be composed within APIs, and data stores to be nested within API compositions. The visual composer enables users to embed multiple functional layers (web service calls, data store queries, processing logic) within a single composed API structure, organizing complexity hierarchically rather than linearly.
Data Source
AI summary
Individual datasets are accessed using an application programming interface (API). Multiple APIs may be combined into a composite API that allows a user to access multiple datasets using a single query. The composite API may be designed to provide a simpler way to consume information from multiple datasets in response to a particular scenario or problem. The composite API may comprise multiple levels of intermediate APIs that call on each other to access desired datasets. A user may select the datasets that the composite API accesses and/or the composite API may require certain specific datasets. The composite API may be offered for sale or use by other users via a website, such as a data market.