Thoughts on Open Platform Development
As an organization, when you start discussions on open platform development, it means the platform you've been working on, developing and maintaining has come of age to a inflection point where you need to decide what interfaces you need to provide, what API standards you need to follow, and what's the end goal you want to achieve. The decisions you make will have profound impact on future feature development, partner application integration, cost of maintenance and long-term scalability.
The following are two areas I'd recommend that you consider: business considerations and technology drivers.
Business Considerations
An open platform nurtures a healthy ecosystem for the enterprise, partners, and developers. Not only should you consider the backend infrastructure and development, you need to consider the impact on mobile App development, B2B integrations such that the ease of developing Apps and integration will facilitate wider adoption of your platform. This in turn has profound financial impact as an open platform increases business opportunities.
Organizations, companies, agencies all build their business processes around an open, scalable and stable platforms. Many of the top platforms are all open platforms and they helped create so many downstream applications based on specific problems that are not in the core functionality of these platforms.
Technology Drivers
Developing open platforms is the direction the overall industry is going. APIs have become the industry standard for system interfaces. Well-defined APIs hide complexity and expose existing functionality so that developers can easily develop their own applications based on these APIs. A good set of API is also the basis for porting traditional systems/functionality into the cloud.
When you start planning on developing APIs for your platform, you have to keep in mind that you should strive towards making it easier for other business units and partners to access system and data. As you start offering and publish APIs, there is associated security aspects that must be taken into consideration.
API management is a separate topic that I can discuss in a future article, but here is the set of principles that you need to consider:
- Your APIs should be secure and scalable;
- Your APIs should ensure developers and partners are productive;
- Your APIs should be able to manage, secure and mediate API traffic;
- Your APIs should be future proof, that is, you need to grow your API set to meet increasing demands.
One last point I need to touch on is the the difference between open platform and open source. By definition, open source means the transparency of the entire code base. Anyone from anywhere can access the entire code base, and make changes on their own. Open platforms need to be extensible and well documented, and at the same time it needs have critical mass deployment. Some of the web content management systems (CMS), such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are both open source and they are considered open platforms.