
CloudRail – A Universal API for Stripe, Facebook, Slack, Dropbox, Twilio and More - kwrt
http://cloudrail.com/cr-product/
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jefflinwood
This seems more complicated than just using the original APIs, as none of the
sample applications or StackOverflow questions you might find with a quick
Google (for instance, creating a capability token with Twilio) would apply any
more.

As thinkingkong asked, what's the use case?

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kwrt
Did you try it? I think it makes it way easier if you need to integrate more
than one API. But open for your opinions or suggestions how to improve it. The
solution has just been launched, so yes there are not many tutorials out
there.

Use case is if you need to integrate more than one API in your app.

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jefflinwood
I was just trying to figure out what problem developers had that you were
trying to solve.

From your web site, it appears that your thesis is that (some) developers have
a problem using multiple API's from multiple providers, and you are offering
an integrated approach to make their lives easier.

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kwrt
That's right. We've heard from developers that they spend over 50% of their
development time for an ordanary app to integrate other services via APIs.
CloudRail tries to reduce that significantly. 1 API (with some configuration)
instead of N APIs for N services.

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tomasien
I can see this getting useful if you either are integrating unnecessarily
complex APIs or a massive number of fairly simple APIs. Neither Slack nor
Facebook qualify, but I'm assuming this company is betting on the growth of
the IoT (which will likely fall into the "lots of simple APIs" category).

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kwrt
Thanks for the feedback. You are absolutely right. Currently CloudRail is more
tending to simple APIs and a massive number. This is mainly caused by the fact
that actually everybody can add services to the system. So most of the
connected services are created and maintained by the community or even the API
provider itself. Result is of course more simple APIs.

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thinkingkong
Hey guys,

Hope someone from CloudRail is here. I'm not quite sure what problem this is
trying to solve. Do you have an example of where CloudRail would save me time,
or complexity with an integration?

From what I can see, it just looks like a wrapper sitting in top of other
APIs.

~~~
kwrt
The idea is a single API for multiple services, so actually yes kind of a
wrapper. So instead of getting familiar with different APIs and integrating
multiple SDKs you can use the config tool to create a custom API which does
exactly what you need. Eg "I need a function to upload a file to Dropbox, a
function to like a page on Facebook and one to switch on the Philips Hue
light". After integrating the CloudRail SDK, you'll see exactly that endpoint,
even with you individual naming. So just one manual to read, one SDK to
integrate and maintain.

