I have been looking at API catalogue tools to help facilitate reuse particularly given we use a lot of 3rd party vendors and System Integrators where having a tool that can be used to easily pickup integration points. We don’t monetise the interfaces but having a means to harvest the interfaces and generate documentation that can be published.

It is interesting that a lot of the tooling requires manual loading of the interface information and focuses on monetisation and security (Apigee, 3Scale etc). Oracle provides these capabilities through the API Management product. But the API catalogue offers the documentation, publication and critically the harvesting capabilities. The only downside is the API Catalogue can only describe SOAP and REST interfaces today.  It would be great to be able to describe other interfaces such as XML over JMS as well. The one advantage that 3Scale and Apigee have at present is the fact they are cloud solutions, Oracle’s API tools are presently not offered as discreet solutions, that said I’d not bet against Oracle launching API Management and API Catalogue as cloud services.