Oracle's API Manager is the company's offering for API lifecycle management.
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OutSystems
Score 9.0 out of 10
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The OutSystems Platform is a Platform-as-a-Service solution for rapid delivery of responsive web and mobile applications. It includes functionalities required to develop, deploy, manage and change web and mobile applications. It is targeted at the delivery of enterprise applications that require integration with backend systems, complex business rules and logic, usable interfaces and flexibility to change. It can be deployed in the cloud, on-premises or in hybrid environments.
Oracle API Manager is well suited in a business or company that make use of Apis to facilitate access of backend services and data sources by the staff or customers or both. It is also imported in situations where all actions in a system need to be attributed to specific users.
Well suited for internal exposure of business processes (invoicing, API layer to other systems, customer maintenance etc), whether a UI is required or not. Not so well suited for full fledged web design. An OutSystems application must serve one particular business need, if gets too much functionalities and responsibilities it tends to get chaotic and complex.
Absence of Role-Based Access. A finer grain control on what type of users can call certain API Endpoints is needed.
Performance with third-party databases isn't as fast as using Oracle Database.
Long learning curve. Although Oracle API Manager provides performance and a vast deal of features, a certain level of expertise is required to effectively make use of them.
Price – The licensing model of OutSystems is very expensive and not suitable for small scale developments. This is offset by the time to develop and stability for larger scale developments
Flexibility on PaaS version – The PaaS hosted version of OutSystems limits your flexibility to access the front end and backend database systems which can significantly restrict your options on high data volume developments or where anything requiring slightly out of the ordinary access is required
Same price for PaaS and self-hosted system. Licensing model dictates that you pay the same price even when you host the system on your own hardware which effectively means you pay more to manage the infrastructure yourself
We are very happy with OutSystems and our developers deliver good work. OutSystems lets us build new software on a regulare (2 weekly) basis, which is highly flexible and adjustable. Even without very much experience, our developers manage to build usefull software, which is working a lot better than our previous (legacy) software.
I am really happy using OutSystems in my work. It gives me the opportunity to create good working software without having had very much IT-experience before. It also made me more interested in the background of IT and learning different languages.
The tech support is very reachable. Usually by [email] from but also by phone if needed. We had some difficulties at the start with understanding "what our machine was doing" under high performance load. After some good sessions understanding our needs they delivered good solutions for our problems we had in the beginning.
The online training material is well designed and explanations are step by step, helping trainees to understand and follow each exercise and new concept.
In a large company, patiently and consistently work the behind the scenes politics with business and IT partners across the firm. This is transformational - you will need a solid set of key business partners to lock arms together to move forward.
Oracle API Manager is much easier to learn and understand then IBM Data Power Gateway and IBM API Connect. We selected Oracle API Manager in our company because to have a good intuitive interface with drag and drop features and because beginners and easily get up to speed to use this tool.
I tried to use WordPress with some success. Also looked at Joomla. But when I saw OutSystems I knew I had been wasting my time there. It takes you longer to get going with OutSystems - but even I as a novice realized immediately that Outsystems is simply in another league. Outsystems is powerful. (Can you compare WordPress and Joomla to Outsystems - I don't think so).
Oracle API Manager supports both REST & SOAP API's.
Secure and attributable connection to back-end services and data sources. In addition to creating API's for querying data, you can also create API endpoints that can manipulate the data in the back-end databases.
Although Oracle API Manager provides performance and a vast deal of features, to start with it is really important you train your people working on development, deployment and administrators to effectively use Oracle API Manager.
The ease of use of the OutSystems development process has been the biggest ROI for us. We have developed our Framework product and maintained/enhanced it with only 4 workers.
OutSystems has enhanced their product very significantly over the last 4 years. They have gone from a simple to use tool to a very simple to use sophisticated tool that covers the standard mainframe-based computing apps and the apps used on handheld mobile devices all using the same basic set of development tools.
