About DreamFactory

A lot of people don’t know this, but our integration solution actually started as a tool to help us with another product.

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DreamFactory originated as a Salesforce-focused product that helped administrators manage their data. The team started to see that it was difficult to access data, no matter the source. So the team started getting really good at understanding APIs, especially those mission-critical APIs within internal enterprise applications and systems.

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As we worked with more customers, we kept hearing how much time and resources companies were spending to build internal integrations and REST services. And we were not alone in this conclusion - Gartner has found 80% of the cost and time of application development is devoted to the backend, and Forrester found that APIs are the single largest bottleneck for IT teams.

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The Idea

We started wondering, why isn’t there a Ruby on Rails for APIs?

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We looked at existing API Management providers, but none of them had the ability to actually generate new APIs. We conceived of what we, as developers, needed:

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1. Something that was self-hosted and fully controlled by the user, so it was always available and not affected the limitation of outsourced solution providers. Also, it must be simple enough that onboarding new team members was easy and scalable.
2. Something that built standardized and re-usable APIs to stop the constant cycle of APIs changes and breakage.
3. Something that actually made building secure APIs easy by integrating necessary security controls into the platform and making them part of the normal workflow. 
4. Something that was very fast and actually reduced the time needed to get integrations and associated API management and controls completed. 

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The Platform

So with these lofty goals in mind we started building a platform ourselves. We not only wanted it to do most of the heavy lifting regarding these integrations, but would it also needed to incorporate development and security best practices so we could move quickly onto the next project. 

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Soon the idea took off, and we started seeing there was a real opportunity here to do away with a very painful, unpredictable, slow but critical part of development through automation. Better yet, we had a vision that no developer would ever need to deal with untangling custom, bespoke, or undocumented integrations. And a centralized platform that could tap into all your systems and manage business logic & governance across the entire enterprise.

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Against advice, we released an open source version out of respect to the OSS tools we had benefited from, and without which, we would never have been able to complete this project. To this day, we remain fervent believers that the apps of tomorrow won’t arrive without companies dedicated to maintaining open source communities, despite the associated costs. 

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DreamFactory OSS is available for Postgres and MongoDB. Additional connectors and features are available on our commercial version. 

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If you haven’t generated a fully documented, standardized, live and secure REST API for anything in less than 30 seconds, take our open source solution for a spin. If you are looking to build a mobile app fast, combine data from unrelated data sources in a single API call or find a simpler solution to ETL and data warehousing, we are chomping at the bit to show you what our disruptive software can do for you!