There is an overwhelming number of software services being presented, and sometimes launched, within the financial industry which promotes APIs as the ONLY user interface and that it is some kind of magic pill.
Don’t get me wrong, I love APIs, that is one of the main reasons why I started Bricknode in 2010 (now part of Huddlestock). There is a lot of misunderstanding going around though. In 2010, talking about API-first was cool and new, talking about API-first today is just lame 😂 because it is assumed.
The image below shows how a typical application is structured.
An API is the interface that is used by other applications that would like to communicate programmatically with an application. A Graphical User Interface typically uses an API to communicate with the business logic and eventually the database of its own application.
The API is a pre-cursor to the Graphical User Interfaces. If you are building an application for other developers then having an API as your only interface is fine but if you are building an application for humans then you also need a Graphical User Interface but that is hard work and takes time!
It is much easier to just knock up an API and then say that you are done with it 😊and other developers have to do the hard work with building the interface for other humans to interact with your application.
Generally, even if you are just doing an API as your interface there is usually a need for some sort of GUI too so that a developer can make some types of configurations.
At Bricknode (now Huddlestock) we spent many years building up multiple GUIs and lots of API functionality while at the same time serving real customers and putting our products to practice. By doing it that way we made sure that what we built could be used both by machines and humans which I think is key!