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Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) play an essential role in modern software development by facilitating communication between different applications. APIs transfer information, data, and commands from one application to another, making them crucial for running programs.

In today's digital realm, APIs are the cornerstone of innovation and collaboration, fueling the engine of Digital Transformation. However, with their rapid proliferation comes the urgent need for governance and control.

Over the last 20 years, API management has developed dynamically. You could go back even further in the history of “computing” and end up in the late 1960s, where the term “application program interface” first appeared in literature. But let's limit ourselves to the more recent past, where the discussion is still interesting and enlightening.

Since the existence of Java, there’s been a need to access libraries and third-party memory written in other programming languages. This is particularly true for those developed with C/C++. The Java platform offers the Java Native Interface (JNI) for these accesses. With JNI, applications can contain native code written in programming languages like C/C++ and in the Java programming language.

It’s been a few weeks since we wrapped up another great edition of the API Conference but we still remember the amazing talks! One of them was Erik Wilde's keynote, “API Anti-Patterns: WD-40 for Your Digital Initiatives”, where he looks at the most important aspects of API management and illustrates which problems jeopardize the success of API management, and ultimately of digital initiatives.