Ostensibly Extensible

Posted by: Tom Heinan

Or, The APIs that Bind - why open apps are the way to go.

First, a (very) brief history of (virtual) time...

Back in the olden days (circa StarCraft I and the Hamster Dance), if you wanted to do anything productive over the internet, you had to download a piece of software and install it on your computer.  This worked out alright, except if you had to go somewhere without a computer, or you got a nasty virus that replaced all the files on your hard drive with hand-drawn pictures of sea creatures (Google it, this actually happened).

Fast forward a few years, and you'll find the first fledgling "web apps" being born - fully functional pieces of software that you could actually interact with online!  Suddenly, doing things like checking your email or sending really annoying ecards to people became as easy as visiting any other site on the Internet.

Nowadays, we pretty much take "the cloud" for granted - we're done with having to actually go to an app to interact with its features.  Today, the app comes to us.

Welcome to the Age of Extensibility!

Extensibility: the capacity for people to add value to your application, either by adding new features or using existing features in new and exciting ways.  Extensibility is awesome.  Why? I hear you ask - Why is extensibility so great?  My app does what I want it to do, so what's the problem? 

The problem is this: about the only things on the Internet more plentiful than weird browser glitches are new use cases - new scenarios in which a user wants to do some normal, familiar thing in a previously undiscovered and interesting way.  For example, yes, you can open up http://my.aptela.com in a browser, log in, go to the messages tab, and check your Aptela voicemails.  That's about four clicks, and in my opinion, that's about four clicks too many.

Case in point: the Aptela Chrome Extension.

Aptela is extensible - you can take Aptela features and put them wherever you like.  For example, we'll take a quick look at the recently released Aptela extension for Google Chrome.

The extension adds some new functionality to Chrome: it merges your VoIP super-powers with your every-day browsing experience, enabling you to dial phone numbers on websites with a single click.  In and of itself, it's a neat little feature.  But the Chrome extension does something else, too: it allows you to check your voicemails and faxes right from the plugin's pop-up menu - no web app required!  And that brings four or five clicks down to one or two.  Cool, huh?

In fact, the Aptela application has been architected in such a way that anything you can do via the web interface, you can abstract and encapsulate.  You can take granular, atomic bits of functionality and expose them in new and more intuitive ways, integrate them into pre-existing systems, or chain them together to make entirely new features and functionality.  In the world of extensible web apps, the sky's the limit!

Of course, implementation and specific how-tos are the subject of another blog post, but for now, I hope I've illuminated for you why extensible is sensible.  Remember, if you build it, they will compile...