Making another strategic advance in the public cloud, Oracle Corp. today acquired Apiary Inc., a San Francisco-based startup focused on easing the creation of application programming interfaces.

The move comes two days after Oracle announced a major expansion for its infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

Apiary’s flagship APIFlow service enables developers to easily put together an API for a project without having to spend hours writing code. Instead, they only need to lay out the high-level specifications using a prototyping syntax built into the platform that is described as much simpler than traditional languages.

Apiary turns these specifications into so-called Server Mocks that serve a similar role as the wire frames that designers use to plan out an application’s user interface, with one difference: Server Mocks are fully functional. As a result, development teams can use the APIs they create in APIFlow to test out different features and see how their applications handle incoming traffic under various conditions.

The idea is to let companies quickly work out the best way of exposing their web services to the world without getting bogged down in code. Apiary claims that APIFlow makes it possible to create an API in as little as 30 minutes depending on the situation.

Oracle said in a press release that the service will be intergated into its public cloud following today’s acquisition. APIFlow’s front-end capabilities will complement the company’s existing API management services, which mostly focus on back-end tasks such as security and monitoring. Oracle’s goal is to provide an all-inclusive platform that enables companies to centrally handle every aspect of their APIs.

Such a value proposition could provide the technology giant with a much-needed boost in the public cloud, where its rivals are also working to bolster their API management capabilities. Google bought Apigee Inc.  for $625 million in September as part of the effort while Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. both offer their own competing services.

Given the central role of APIs in the cloud arms race, Oracle likely paid considerably more for Apiary than the roughly $8.5 million it has raised from investors. This is further reaffirmed by the fact that the startup boasts a sizable enterprise user base that includes the likes of Salesforce.com Inc., Viacom Inc., Bloomberg L.P. and others.

Image courtesy of Apiary