At the moment I often find myself in conversations discussing which tools & programming languages are currently the most popular. Usually, it's about apparent advantages, but often only about the hype, a technology is experiencing. As a developer, it's also my job to stay up to date. Nevertheless, I often notice in the aftermath that the choice of technology and programming language no longer deserves the importance we give it.

Many of our Partners ask us which technology is needed to develop solutions with tapio. The answer is simple: it doesn't matter! Almost all functions tapio provides to the outside world are based on so-called REST APIs. As a non-techie, you can imagine this as a website that displays data that other programs can process instead of excellent pictures and buttons. These APIs can be accessed (like a normal website) via the HTTP(S) protocol, allowing interaction for any technology that can send an HTTP request. I don't currently know any relevant technology platform that can't send an HTTP request.

Of course, there are a few things that are difficult or impossible to map using a REST API. But here, too, we rely on proven standard protocols to offer developers the greatest possible flexibility when choosing their technology. In this age of agile teams, where each team member may have a different area of expertise, the interoperability of a system is much more critical than the technology behind it. This has also established an essential paradigm for infrastructure operators such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google:

API First

The term "mobile first" may be familiar from web development, where the first focus is on the mobile presentation of the website. Applied to software development, the aim is to develop the functionality of an application first to be used via an API.

As with the development of mobile websites, this approach requires a certain amount of discipline and also entails some problems. At tapio we have accepted this challenge and work daily to perfect it.