Konica Minolta OpenAPI

Last updated May 10, 2019

Konica Minolta OpenAPI is a proprietary API communication system that allows software application developers to create applications that communicate with Konica Minolta MFPs.

Konica Minolta, Inc. is a Japanese multinational technology company headquartered in Marunouchi, Chiyoda, Tokyo, with offices in 49 countries worldwide. The company manufactures business and industrial imaging products, including copiers, laser printers, multi-functional peripherals (MFPs) and digital print systems for the production printing market. Konica Minolta's Managed Print Service (MPS) is called Optimised Print Services. The company also makes optical devices, including lenses and LCD film; medical and graphic imaging products, such as X-ray image processing systems, colour proofing systems, and X-ray film; photometers, 3-D digitizers, and other sensing products; and textile printers. It once had camera and photo operations inherited from Konica and Minolta but they were sold in 2006 to Sony, with Sony's Alpha series being the successor SLR division brand.

Technology

Konica Minolta OpenAPI is based around a SOAP/XML architecture, however a "wrapper" to abstract the SOAP messages is provided to allow developers to use the Microsoft .NET Framework instead. The wrapper is also available for Mono, with no significant differences to the .NET wrapper. The direct SOAP interface has also been used successfully from the Java language in commercial products^[1] and deployed on various other operating systems including Linux, OS X, Novell OES 2 and Windows.

SOAP is a messaging protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of web services in computer networks. Its purpose is to provide extensibility, neutrality and independence. It uses XML Information Set for its message format, and relies on application layer protocols, most often Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), for message negotiation and transmission.

XML Markup language developed by the W3C for encoding of data

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The W3C's XML 1.0 Specification and several other related specifications—all of them free open standards—define XML.

.NET Framework is a software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It includes a large class library named as Framework Class Library (FCL) and provides language interoperability across several programming languages. Programs written for .NET Framework execute in a software environment named the Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CLR is an application virtual machine that provides services such as security, memory management, and exception handling. As such, computer code written using .NET Framework is called "managed code". FCL and CLR together constitute the .NET Framework.

Despite being a SOAP based technology, it differs from a traditional Open API in that it is for communication between an application and an MFPs rather than two web services. The application may be a web service, however this would be incidental only.

An open API is a publicly available application programming interface that provides developers with programmatic access to a proprietary software application or web service. APIs are sets of requirements that govern how one application can communicate and interact with another. APIs can also allow developers to access certain internal functions of a program, although this is not typically the case for web APIs. In the simplest terms, an API allows one piece of software to interact with another piece of software, whether within a single computer via a mechanism provided by the operating system or over an internal or external TCP/IP-based or non-TCP/IP-based network. In the late 2010s, many APIs are provided by organisations for access with HTTP. APIs may be used by both developers inside the organisation that published the API or by any developers outside that organisation who wish to register for access to the interface.

Name

Despite the name "Open API", it is a proprietary technology, and neither is it an Open Source system, nor is the SDK or a specification of the interface publicly available. It is only "open" in the sense that other companies may, under Konica Minolta's rules, develop applications that use it.

Supported Models

Konica Minolta OpenAPI supports most new Konica Minolta MFPs between the speeds of 20 and 75 pages per minute. Not all models are supported, and different models have different levels of support for the API. Despite this, a part of the API is able to query the supported functions and version levels available from the MFP and a stated goal of the API is to allow communication to multiple different devices, without the concern over their exact model - as such, backwards compatibility and conformity across the range is strongly emphasised.

Licensing model

Application developers wishing to use Konica Minolta OpenAPI should contact their local Konica Minolta office. Different regions within the world have different license models for OpenAPI, ranging from "free, but unsupported - support with payment", to "only available at Konica Minolta's discretion".

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References

↑ "PaperCut MF - Tour - Copier / MFD Integration - Konica Minolta" . Retrieved 2009-10-09.

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[PaperCut-1] "PaperCut MF - Tour - Copier / MFD Integration - Konica Minolta" . Retrieved 2009-10-09.