Thereʼs an understated art to building good APIs—ones that are easy to integrate with, that are operationally highly available, that offer readily attainable performance insights, and are easy to maintain. If a platform allowed you to substantially reduce engineering time and dollars spent and still produce a high-quality APIs, would you use it?
SourceForge recently caught up with the team at Twenty57, the makers of Linx – high-performance low-code development platform, to shed some light on API development and how their low code tool empowers IT professionals and developers to deliver enterprise-grade APIs.
Can you please share with us a brief history of the company? When and how did Linx get its start?
Linx was born in 2001 in the basement of a house in London where the founders of the company rebooted after selling their first venture. Here they re-imagined how a low-code tool should work after their experience of building and using one at their first company.
We got our first large client in 2002 when two of the largest Asset Managers in Africa merged to form Stanlib and selected Linx to do the migration and post-merger systems integration. Stanlib is still a customer.
In 2016, after more than a decade of growth in the SA financial services sector, we decided that Linx is ready for a larger audience and started to offer it to customers outside our traditional market. Linx now has both SaaS and on-premise offerings and is steadily growing its international customer base.
What expertise do you provide and who are your current customers?
We’re experts at backend systems where the natural interface is the API and the moving parts are geared towards automation and integration. Right from the beginning our founders envisaged a world where everything is automated and as the world moved from file APIs through sharing databases to HTTP APIs our experience grew with it. Linx encapsulates everything we’ve learnt over the last twenty years about building these automated systems with a low-code development environment.
Along the way we also noticed that once Linx enables people to quickly build the logic they have in mind, the next stumbling block becomes understanding and interfacing with systems they do not know. Here our experienced customer success team adds fantastic value in helping customers over unfamiliar hurdles.
Our enterprise customers are mostly in financial services and include banks, insurance companies and investment managers. SME customers are much more diverse and include sectors like retail, property management, media, professional services, non-profits, stockbrokers and software services.
One of my favourite use cases is with Colorado 911 Dispatch Centre, where the value of the Linx solutions has helped emergency responders save lives. One of the integral operational capabilities of the centre is the PSAP Messaging; the ability to contact and notify public safety resources and public residents via multiple mediums such as phone, email, text, etc. This system, named CODERED, could only be used via a Web Browser, and took roughly 1-2 minutes to create and launch a notification. The solution created using Linx allowed the dispatchers to not only reduce that time to 15 seconds or less, but also remove the need to use another application (i.e. web browser) to do so; by using their primary Computer Aided Dispatch software to enter a short syntactical command via integrated command-line tools, that will submit the desired notification request to a Linx exposed web service, and in turn Linx will perform the start-to-finish automation of message validation, creation, launch, and status of that request.
The industry is abuzz with stories on how no-code/low-code platforms are redefining app development. Can you explain how Linx fits into the low-code landscape?
Linx specializes in building and hosting backend services which means APIs, automations and integrations. You cannot use Linx to build a user interface but you can use Linx to build the backend for your mobile or web app.
In this backend space, most, if not all, low-code tools are based on a workflow paradigm. Linx differs by following a programming paradigm which makes it more of an all-rounder and easy for developers and IT professionals to pick up. You can almost say we’re a low-code Visual Studio for backend development.
Linx is also infrastructure agnostic. Customers can use any of their existing software with Linx. Databases, files, queues, APIs, it doesn’t matter. Most of our enterprise customers run Linx on-premise where it fills the gaps between old and new systems. One of our banking customers uses Linx to build APIs in front of their banking system.
API development is a major area for Linx users. How do API developers feel about using low-code/no-code to deliver APIs?
Most developers are very sceptical about claims made by low-code/no-code platforms. They’ve all hit the boundaries of tools over the years and appreciate the ability of being able to code themselves out of a tight corner. When you start off with a new tool you don’t know where that boundary is so that is a big hurdle for us to cross.
I imagine a developer that spends all day coding APIs in the same stack will be extremely efficient and won’t think about changing to anything else. But take that same developer and overload them with side-jobs e.g. “please create an endpoint for a Slack webhook, store the data somewhere and send me a weekly report” and they might be tempted to try something like Linx that makes it possible to build this kind of thing in minutes and frees up their time to work on the complicated tasks.
On the other hand developers that have a more generalized role or are working as DBAs or devops, and must now build an API, could probably get version 1 of the API out of the door on their own with something like Linx before they even find a specialist API team.
Our customers really embrace it and it starts becoming their goto tool once they’ve recognized its power, but convincing understandably sceptic developers to try it out is tough. We’re still learning how to do it.
How does a low-code platform like Linx help organizations design, develop, and deploy business applications?
Most business applications broadly consist of an interaction layer, like a UI or API, business logic and data storage. These applications are then deployed to some infrastructure where they are managed and monitored. Developers have an immense amount of complexity to deal with when building and maintaining these applications.
Linx reduces the complexity of building the API and business logic layers, and makes deployment, logging and metrics essentially free. A team using Linx will have a much faster turnaround time building the logic layer and with deployment literally in seconds, freeing up time for other projects.
Everyone is talking about the ‘API Economy’. How are you approaching this?
It fits perfectly into our backend niche and the idea that everything should be automated.
Linx already makes building and hosting APIs and Microservices super simple and we’re committed to support SOAP, REST, gRPC, GraphQL and any other API standard that may emerge. But these are only the tip of the iceberg as the bulk of the work sits behind the API e.g. interfacing with other APIs, storing and retrieving data, working with queues etc. We’re investing heavily in all these areas to make our customers’ API building experience as easy and complete as possible.
We don’t have any plans to add ways to monetize APIs to our platform so will leave that to the experts already out there. We’re simply going to stick to making the building and hosting of APIs, whether it’s public or internal, as quick and easy as possible.
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