API Development

Expediting the delivery of an award-winning customer portal for UK Home Association

As businesses increasingly depend on software-based services to generate revenue, creating and maintaining APIs has become a significant part of business strategy. A rich and diverse API ecosystem enables a business to access, process, and provide data, then derive revenue from those activities either directly through sales or indirectly through better efficiency.

Building and launching an API can seem intimidating, especially if you’re new to the space and have limited experience working with APIs. Our client needed a secure and quick way of transferring data from their SQL database to the customer portal,, and exposing parts of it via an API was needed to drive adoption and promote consistency within a development team.

The company needed to transfer data from its existing housing application to its customer portal. The built-in web services of the housing application were insufficient for their specific needs. Many of them ran at a slow pace – for minutes rather than seconds. They realised that they needed to customise a web service solution.

The software development team was tasked with building and deploying a solution to a tight deadline. To customise a solution, they would need to know or learn a specific programming language to write the code. Knowledge and skills would then need to be transferred to the maintenance and support teams so that they can manage these new services efficiently.

The Solution

The customer chose Linx to become a core asset for the business. The most prominent feature was the ability to create web services, mainly providing SQL data to external websites. After successfully delivering its first bespoke solution for data transfer, the company replaced its legacy housing application web services with custom-built solutions designed and executed by Linx.

The company created fast, reliable, and easy-to-maintain web services instantly, which led to the blooming of multiple web services. The results were immediate, and the platform was chosen as the go-to solution for portal integrations. As the developer’s confidence grew with each implementation, so was the business’s uses. Linx is now being reviewed for broader application use, such as the Document Management System. Using Linx to build and host APIs greatly improved the speed and reliability of development, allowing the maintenance and support teams to manage the web services without development experience easily.

In the last couple of years, Linx has been so successful that it has moved from an initial quick fix to become a core part of the business. The company has since created over 70 web services and has won awards for its customer portal.