APIthon by Apigee

    A Hackathon to Empower Indian APP Developers with API Benifits

Srinivasulu Grandhi, VP and Managing Director, Apigee (India) interacting with the participants

Conducted over a time period of 36 hours with close to 60 developers from South India, Apithon was aimed towards sharing and learning new paradigms for today’s programmable world. The event was hosted at Apigee Company building from Dec 13 to 15. Some of the notable developer communities like BangaloreJS (Bangalore Javascript Community), Blrdroid (Bangalore Android Developer Group)  were part of the event. 

Enthusiastic App Developers at Apithon

The idea was to create effective and innovative applications and processes for the evolving digital landscape in India by bringing together some select "app" developers. The participants focused more on 3 Tier App and Mash-up APIs. 3-Tier-App in mobile development is an alternate way to create the mobile stack. In this case, most of the processing is offloaded to the cloud and the mobile is spared from too much processing, thus reducing your scare battery life. Mashup APIs leverage Apigee’s API platform to mash-up different APIs in the cloud infrastructure itself instead making multiple API calls from the mobile itself. Apigee’s platform provides a way to expose the APIs of app developers with minimal effort and zero cost. To architect the mobile stack in a different and efficient way is beneficial to both mobile app developers and users.

A demonstration of App by Developers

Speaking at the event, Srinivasulu Grandhi, VP and Managing Director, Apigee (India) said, “We are in the middle of a digital transformation and all businesses, large or small, need to develop a digital presence in order to survive. They need to create sustainable competitive advantage and win market leadership under the new rules of the programmable world. With Apithon, our aim is to create awareness for the developer community to learn new ways of programming and not just learn but hack to glory by building cool new, contextually rich experiences.”

Nagaraju Kummari, a senior developer employed by Accenture, who participating in the event, said, “App development is much more beyond building a “client app”. It is about providing rich, contextually relevant experiences to your users across a wide variety of devices that they use on a daily basis. It’s great that Apigee is providing us with this intellectually stimulating environment for us to learn, share and unleash our creativity. This has been a wonderful experience.”

Srinivasulu Grandhi of Apigee interacting with Bloggers

Today's smartphones are much more powerful than a Computer in the last decade. The connectivity and computing of gadgets has increased drastically  

and has got the architects and developers to the tipping point of where to split/limit the computing. What amount of computing to be assigned to the mobile phone and how much to offload. This also depends on the time required for the request to travel to the cloud and the response to be returned. It is estimated that nearly fifty billion connected, sensing devices and a trillion instrumented objects will connect people, organizations and things with digital representations as fundamental to their identities as their physical selves. Creating a meaningful connection between all these devices ( which can communicate) is a tricky and challenging problem at hand. By connecting to Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), the devices can deliver on the larger context of their users needs.

Examples: Cars can present live traffic information and help each other avoid congestion/bad roads. TVs and DVDs can stream movies. Washers can run when electricity is cheapest. The possibilities are countless. It only the thinking and effort that can limit us crossing beyond the challenges with nextgen solutions.