Ever work through a project 90% of the way, only to find out that someone else has already done it? Using APIs is a common way to integrate various systems and build modern applications. APIs are composable building blocks that help deliver digital services faster. But, the reality is that APIs created within an organization often lack visibility and relevant documentation to promote their reuse by other teams. What if you can have a single source of truth that allows you to find, view, and engage with APIs?
We’re excited to announce the release of the Anypoint API Experience Hub, MuleSoft’s customizable API portal solution that helps organizations better manage their portfolio of APIs and maximize their API investments. In this blog post, we’ll dive into the features and benefits of the new solution for developers and organizations.
What is an API portal?
An API portal is a one-stop interface that helps API providers to expose and publicize their APIs, educate developer communities about them, share documentation, and provide self-service access to API consumers. Some API portals have additional capabilities like a mocking service to allow developers to test an API, see example responses, and analyze whether the API meets their requirements, thus saving overall developer time. API portals can be created for both internal and external developers, which provides opportunities to increase the business value of your APIs.
In the backend, a good API portal also requires API and user management, built-in security, and the ability to quickly make changes to the portal when needed. With all these factors in mind, MuleSoft has created a solution that enables organizations to build branded API portals that increase API visibility and developer engagement.
Anypoint API Experience Hub
Today, MuleSoft released Anypoint API Experience Hub, a new solution that enables organizations to build developer portals for their API products. With API Experience Hub, API product managers can build personalized developer portals within minutes using an out-of-the-box template that help them productize, publish, and engage with APIs built across any technology or platform.
API Experience Hub is powered by Salesforce Experience Cloud and is a part of MuleSoft’s Universal API Management solution, which enables organizations to discover, govern, publish, and engage with any API built across any gateway or environment.
As a developer, you will be able to take advantage of the following benefits with Anypoint API Experience Hub:
- Build API portals within minutes
- Discover and reuse APIs easily
- Save time on documentation
- Collaborate with other developers
Let’s take a look at each benefit in detail.
Build API portals within minutes
With API Experience Hub, you don’t need web development experience to build an API portal, which saves you weeks of creating and troubleshooting a website from scratch. You will be guided throughout the process with no need to go back and forth between documentation and the portal setup pages. You can customize your organization’s brand and colors with clicks allowing you to build your API portal within minutes.
Want to make changes to the base template? You can customize even more through Salesforce Experience Builder and drag-and-drop various components. Taking advantage of Experience Cloud capabilities, you can even develop and add custom Lighting Web Components to further enhance the user experience.
Discover and reuse APIs easily
Since API Experience Hub is part of Anypoint Platform, any API within your organization that’s cataloged in Anypoint Exchange can be made available in your API portal. Anypoint Exchange is an internal marketplace for your organization where you can share API specifications, fragments, connectors, integration templates, and more. However, with API Experience Hub, developers can curate and share the most consumable APIs for internal and external consumption. In addition, Experience Hub comes with built-in search capabilities that will enable you to find specific APIs quickly and easily for reuse.
There is also a built-in API Details page that gives you information on each API and allows you to download or request access to APIs.
Save time on documentation
So, you might be wondering, how does the documentation work? When your API specification is ready to be shared on the API portal, you won’t need to document everything from scratch! With auto-generative documentation capabilities, Experience Hub populates documentation and examples based on your API specification. This benefits you in two huge ways:
- Save time when building your API specification documentation. You can, of course, add custom documentation or add more context, but Experience Hub will do most of the work for you.
- When you are looking for APIs to incorporate into your project, you can go to the API portal knowing that there is documentation and examples available.
Lastly, Experience Hub comes with a Try It feature that allows you to make mock calls to an API to find out what an example response would look like.
Collaborate with other developers
As mentioned earlier, Anypoint API Experience Hub is built on Salesforce Experience Cloud, an enterprise-class web publishing system. This means that when you build an API portal through Experience Hub, you can take advantage of numerous out-of-the-box capabilities for communities, forums, and support. To learn more about Experience Cloud, check out this trail!
The personalized API portal helps improve engagement with APIs by enabling both internal and external developers to collaborate effectively to improve an API, all within a single, unified platform without knowledge silos.
Conclusion
With Anypoint API Experience Hub, you can build an API portal quickly, discover and reuse APIs, save time on documentation, and collaborate with other developers easily. Your organization can get an API portal up and running within minutes through a simple setup process and portal template.
If you want to learn more about Anypoint API Experience Hub, check out our product spotlight video.
Dive even deeper into Anypoint API Experience Hub by watching our webinar, Build API Ecosystems Faster on MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform. In this webinar, you’ll learn how the new Anypoint API Experience Hub, built on Salesforce Experience Cloud, allows you to quickly build engaging API experiences using APIs cataloged in Anypoint Exchange.
About the author
Sue Siao is a Technical Product Marketing Manager at Salesforce. She is a content creator who brings products to life through technical demos. Outside of working hours, she mentors youth in the San Francisco Bay Area and goes bouldering.