Given the billions of dollars that IBM Corp. has spent on making its public cloud a more attractive place for developers to run their applications, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s also taken an interest in the programming interfaces through which those applications interact. The company is debuting a new service today that promises to take some of the hassle out of implementing third party integrations in software projects.

IBM API Harmony is hardly the first attempt at accomplishing that but nonetheless manages to stand out from all the existing offerings with the same value proposition by approaching the challenge at a different angle. Instead of focusing on the coding involved in the process of linking one application to another, the tool uses machine learning algorithms to help developers decide which of the services available at their disposal would work best with a given project based on various operational parameters.

The functionality is implemented in the form of a search engine that shortlists what API Harmony identifies as the best options from the catalog of internal and partner-developed services on IBM’s public cloud in order to avoid the need to individually compare every entry that matches a query. That means a developer working on, say, an application that uses financial data stored in their organization’s mainframe wouldn’t have to wade through dozens of hits in the same category before finding the one particular legacy interface they’re looking for.

To help draw some attention to its efforts, IBM is founding a new community initiative under the umbrella of The Linux Foundation in conjunction to establish an organized development roadmap for Swagger, the most popular API management framework in the open-source ecosystem. It’s also joining two healthcare- and banking-specific work groups to create common standards for exchanging information among applications, which its own API management service will no doubt be among the first to support once they’re ready.

Image via Geralt