The Power of Real-Time Unified APIs

Application programming interfaces (APIs) allow communication between two or more applications; for example, between a web application on your browser and a server application or between multiple server applications. So, if you want to build an application that exchanges data with third-party applications, you need to integrate their APIs into your application. This process can quickly become complex as each API may have differing integration types (REST, SOAP, GraphQL), error handling, response formats, and testing needs.

In this article, you will learn about unified APIs and the power of real-time unified APIs and their benefits. You will also learn how real-time unified APIs differ from traditional unified APIs.

What Is a Unified API

A unified API aggregates multiple APIs into a single interface, allowing for seamless communication with any of the integrated APIs using the same interface. If you have a dedicated platform team, you could develop unified APIs in-house. However, using a dedicated unified API service, like Apideck, can accelerate development and reduce costs.

Consider an example where you're building an artificial intelligence (AI) app that analyzes user-uploaded files and provides tailored content summaries of the contents. You also want to allow users to analyze their cloud storage files from Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or Box. Individually integrating each cloud storage provider's API can be complex due to differences in data schema, authentication, pagination, and error-handling methods.

A unified API service like Apideck simplifies this process and offers a single point of entry for all these cloud providers. For example, you can fetch files from any cloud storage provider using a single API by specifying the service ID rather than making requests to each specific provider's API:

Read more about What's A Unified API in this in-depth article.

Unified API Advantages

Unified APIs offer several advantages that can significantly enhance your third-party API integration:

• Consolidated multiple APIs: Unified APIs consolidate various third-party APIs into one consistent interface, reducing the need to learn and manage different APIs.
• Increased time and money savings: Employing a Unified API can save significant time and effort, as you don't have to build and maintain separate integrations for each application. This efficiency translates into cost savings, as you spend less on integration tasks, allowing you to focus on core functionalities and innovation.
• Easy to set up and manage: Unified APIs simplify the process of setting up and managing multiple API integrations by offering a centralized setup and management system. You can quickly integrate new applications and manage existing connections from a single platform. Additionally, the standardized interface reduces the learning curve, making it easier for you to onboard new developers.
• Scalable and flexible: Unified APIs are designed to scale with your needs, providing robust performance and reliability even as the number of API calls and integrated services rises. This scalability ensures that your application remains responsive and capable of handling increased loads without significant reengineering.
• Improved security and compliance: Unified APIs often come with built-in security features and compliance certifications that help to protect sensitive data. These features help ensure adherence to regulatory requirements, enforce consistent security policies, and reduce the risk of exposure associated with multiple API integrations.
• Centralized error handling: Unified APIs provide your application with a single point for error handling, making it easier for you to identify, debug, and resolve issues.

Why Use Real-Time Unified APIs

Unlike traditional cache-based unified APIs, real-time unified APIs do not store data. Instead, they process requests on the fly and return responses directly from the third-party integrated APIs in real time, ensuring fresh and accurate data. To understand the advantages of real time in this context, let's first look at how traditional unified APIs work.

Traditional unified API service providers store data from the third-party API applications you integrate with. They then poll the third-party APIs at set intervals, which could range from every six hours to daily, monthly, or other custom periods. Therefore, when your app requests data from an integrated third-party app via the unified API, the response comes from the unified API data store, and the freshness depends on the polling interval. If the interval is infrequent, there could be significant delays in data updates, leading to potential discrepancies between the actual data and what your application presents to the users. This lag can be problematic in scenarios where real-time data is critical for operational efficiency and decision-making.

Adopting real-time unified APIs can significantly improve the performance and reliability of your applications. Since these APIs fetch data directly from the source upon request, you can be sure that your application always operates with the most accurate and current data. They also remove the need for managing a separate data store for storage unless your application needs it.

The following sections explore the specific benefits of real-time unified APIs in more detail.

Data Freshness

Real-time unified APIs ensure data freshness by fetching information directly from the source at the moment of the request. It is vital for maintaining up-to-date and accurate data, which is essential when you're dealing with dynamic information.

This data freshness is particularly crucial for time-sensitive applications like human resources information systems (HRIS) and accounting used in large organizations. In HRIS, for example, HR managers rely on the most recent employee data to make informed decisions about staffing, attendance, and payroll. Any delay in data could result in incorrect payroll calculations, missed compliance deadlines, or uninformed staffing decisions. Similarly, in accounting, real-time access to financial data allows accountants to monitor cash flows, track expenses, and generate accurate financial reports promptly. For real-time financial analysis, having the latest data ensures that businesses can react swiftly to financial anomalies, optimize budgeting, and make data-driven decisions that keep them financially healthy.

Data Privacy

Real-time unified APIs improve data privacy because they do not store data. Any privacy settings or policies that are updated in the downstream services are instantly incorporated into the data accessed via the API. As a result, there is no delay in enforcing new privacy measures, which minimizes the risk of data breaches. Since data is fetched directly and not stored in an intermediate system, real-time APIs prevent sensitive information from being stored in potentially vulnerable intermediate databases. There is no risk of unauthorized access to stored data, storage failures, or accidental data leaks.

Traditional unified APIs that rely on periodic polling and data storage are susceptible to various storage-related issues, including hardware malfunctions, software bugs, and malicious attacks targeting stored data. In contrast, real-time APIs eliminate these risks because they don't retain any data beyond the immediate transaction.

Better Developer Experience

Real-time unified APIs improve the developer experience of immediate and accurate data retrieval, which is crucial in maintaining the integrity and responsiveness of modern applications. Traditional unified APIs often rely on data returned based on the vendor’s pre-configured intervals which can lead to outdated information. However, Real-time APIs ensure that the information developers work with is always up-to-date. This reduces the complexity and effort required to manage data synchronization and ensures that applications can respond to changes instantly, making the development process more efficient and less prone to errors..

For example, in an e-commerce setting, Real-time unified APIs enable instant updates to inventory levels, pricing, and customer activities. When a product is purchased, the stock level is immediately updated across all platforms, ensuring that your customers see accurate information and preventing issues like overselling. In contrast, with traditional unified APIs, the data might be outdated depending on how frequently the vendor updates it, leading to potential discrepancies. Real-time APIs thus help developers create more reliable and responsive e-commerce applications, focusing on delivering a seamless user experience without the added complexity of managing delayed data updates.

Better Write Support

Real-time unified APIs can provide superior support for write operations due to their direct interaction with third-party services. When you make a change or update through a real-time unified API, it is immediately reflected in the source service. This immediacy ensures that your data is always current and synchronized across all platforms, which is essential for maintaining data integrity and consistency. For instance, if your application relies on a file exchange service, any modifications or uploads made by one user need to be instantly visible to other users to ensure seamless collaboration. With real-time unified APIs, updates are propagated immediately, ensuring that all users are always working with the most up-to-date files.

Cost-Effective Pricing

Real-time unified APIs offer a cost-effective pricing model by eliminating the need for extensive data storage and management infrastructure. In traditional unified APIs, the requirement for constant polling and data storage leads to significant costs related to data storage, backup, and maintenance. As real-time APIs fetch the data directly from the source at the moment of the request, you don't need to invest in or maintain complex storage systems. This streamlined approach reduces overhead costs and simplifies your infrastructure, allowing you to allocate resources more efficiently and reduce your total expenditure on data management.

Conclusion

Real-time unified APIs offer significant advantages over traditional unified APIs, providing a superior developer experience, enhanced data privacy, better support for write operations, cost-effective pricing, and greater flexibility. They simplify development by eliminating the need for complex data polling configurations, storage infrastructure, and webhook management. Moreover, it ensures that your applications always operate with the most current data. This immediacy is critical for applications requiring real-time updates, such as e-commerce applications, financial applications, and employee performance metrics platforms.

Apideck unified APIs offer many features that enhance developer experience, streamline integration, and reduce development costs, including custom field mapping, support for over 150 connectors, real-time APIs, custom integration UI, SDKs for popular programming languages, webhooks, and logs. These capabilities make Apideck a powerful solution for efficient and secure API integration. Sign up to get started!