Kevin Barresi, FinTech Studios: Open Web Widgets: Enabling Faster Open API Integration. Kevin is co-founder and CTO of FinTech Studios, former CEO of Iubble Inc, and a technology-centric entrepreneur with a passion for building successful teams, products, and businesses. At FinTech Studios, he helped build the company from an idea to a successful business rooted in a highly performant, secure, and innovative technology infrastructure. A firm believer in innovation as a key to success, Kevin’s approach to engineering products is to “build it once, build it right, and build it for the future”. Kevin holds a B.Eng and M.Eng. in Computer Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology, and currently lives in Hoboken, NJ.

1. Open Web Widgets
Enabling Faster Open API Integration
Kevin Barresi
CTO, FinTech Studios

2. Today
• History of (web) APIs: The Abridged Version
• Open APIs: The Good, The Bad
• Web Widgets: “APIs 2.0“
• Demo
• Applying “openness” to Web Widgets
• Standardization Opportunity

3. “Web 1.0” “Web 2.0”
SOAP
XML
WSDL
‘09: Group Closed
W3C Maintained
Released ‘99 by MSFT
Released ‘00 by IBM et al
Swagger
‘16: OpenAPI Spec
‘10: Wordnik
‘13: ECMA Standard
JSON
‘02: JSON.org
REST ‘00: Roy Fielding

5. APIs: The Good
• More available data? ✔
• Standardized documentation? ✔
• Simplified transactions? ✔

6. APIs: The Bad
• But how can we make the data production ready in our app?
• Example: Adding a new analytic to an existing application.

7. Where to start?
1. Read through API documentation.
1. Find an endpoint(s) that returns the required data fields.
2. Authentication? User management requirements?
2. Run and debug some test queries.
3. Integrate the API into our own backend & add to test suite.
4. Update the frontend to use the new data.
1. UI/UX design
2. Implement
3. Test
4. UAT
5. Add it to the release cycle…
6. Eternal maintenance and updates.

8. How can we improve?
• Processes taking up excessive time:
• Initial setup and research
• Testing transactions
• UI/UX design, integration, and testing
• Keeping up to date with new features, data, and API changes
A lot of
time and
effort

9. Enter: Web Widgets
• APIs: making raw data accessible
• Web Widgets: making fully functional UIs accessible
https://widgets.fintechstudios.com
/widgets/entity-
associations?id=246&navigation=fal
se&noauth&theme=fts-light

10. The New Integration Guide
1. Pick a widget from the widget catalog.
2. Configure SSO (SAML, OAuth 2…)
3. Embed the IFrame.
That’s it!

11. Live Demo

18. Internal Development Community
Closed API Open API Open API
Open Widget
Implementation Implementation
Moving
community
involvement
up the stack

19. Areas of Continued Focus
• Standardization
• Providing structure around datatypes, objects, etc for widgets
• OpenAPI/Swagger descriptions
• Automation & Utilities
• FTS is creating an AngularJS framework for automating widget development
and maintenance.
• Auto-documentation generation, etc.

20. The Takeaway:
APIs: Good
API backed web widgets: Better

21. Thank you!
@kevin_barresi
kevin@fintechstudios.com