The web is evolving. Gone are the days where the HTML web was the sole means of viewing content online. Today, people access content through various media and devices. A consumer may interact with Facebook by visiting the Facebook.com website, launching the Facebook iOS app on their phone, getting Facebook text messages and emails automatically, and cross posting to Facebook automatically from their twitter account.

Content publishers, whether news organizations or government agencies, want to be positioned to provide users an online experience regardless of device or media. Using traditional online publishing systems is going to be expensive, inflexible and expensive to develop.

A Platform Approach

But there is another way: content owners can plan to use a web platform, rather than websites. Web platforms easily scale to support multiple devices and multiple data sources, ensuring that an organizations online presence can target multiple audiences with the latest technology.

To be clear, the word ‘platform’ in this case doesn’t mean a large proprietary system. Rather, we think of a platform as a loosely coupled set of technologies that communicate via open API standards. Think of it as a design approach you can use with any existing set of applications, rather than a product.

The platform approach to designing systems has several advantages:

• Leverage existing systems and applications: Your organization has likely invested a lot of time and money in your existing infrastructure. Using open standards means that you can continue to leverage your existing systems and tools, assuming they work for you. The power of the platform approach is in tying disparate applications together into a coherent system.
• Extensible: As your organization grows and you will add new technologies, databases or applications. With a platform based on open API standards and with everything loosely coupled, integrating new systems into the platform is simple.
• Easy for Developers: The use of open standards means that you can use the best tool for the job to develop user-facing applications. Rather than being tied to a particular vender’s technology stack, you can use whichever tool is right for your users, and still access the content.

Components of an API Web Publishing Platform

Any API web publishing platform has three main components: a data source, a content management system, and a user interface. In an API-based platform, there can be one or many of each component. The glue that holds these different components together are the APIs based on open standards. Which API doesn’t particularly matter, as long as its an open technology that can be implemented across vendor stacks.

• Data Source: Data sources are the repositories of content. Traditionally, these have been large databases housed in the back office of an organization, accessible only via a direct connection. Accessing these data via an API, without requiring the data to be moved from the legacy store to a new physical structure will save substantial money and time. Going forward, data sources are just as likely to be APIs as they are discrete databases. In the platform approach, all data sources, no matter what the storage solution, are exposed and consumed as APIs.
• Content Management System: The primary role of the content management system is to organize content. Content is only useful when users can find it, and the content management system builds out a layer of relationships and organization between content that makes it discoverable.
• User Interface: The user interface is the part of the platform that presents the content from the data sources, and exposes the organization of the content management system to users. The user interface doesn’t have to be on the same system as the content management system. In fact, in holding with the goal of using the right tool for the job, the user interface should be built in whatever language will best suit your users.

More on APIs

What makes the platform approach work, the glue that holds everything together, are Open APIs. Open APIs are basically any mechanism for transferring machine readable information that anyone can implement. The last part is really the key to the platform approach. To ensure that your current and future systems can interoperate, they need to be able to talk to each other. A vendor specific transport protocol means that you are locked into a specific set of technologies and applications, and this drives up costs.

Opportunities

Organizations seeking to expose content in established databases, as well as those who are establishing new data stores may want to consider the API Platform approach. It can minimize expensive, delayed projects focused on building monolithic systems and frees the task of delivering of content from proprietary methods. It makes exposing legacy data that is currently unavailable on the web easy and simple to do.

Moreover, developers utilizing an API Platform on both publishing and delivery ends will enjoy significant benefits when combining and processing content. The really exciting opportunities come from have a flexible architecture that supports innovation by embracing flexibility and easy access to information.