See the latest enhancements in Integration, API Management and more
Software AG's webMethods empowers you to build solutions on the top-rated hybrid integration platform. You can integrate cloud-based apps and on-premises systems without coding, use a microservices-style architecture to deliver and scale new integrations faster, and leverage API management to promote and protect access to APIs. Integrating existing and new technologies with the Internet of Things (IoT) and using many different options for deployment drives agility and innovation.
The webMethods suite spans a broad collection of capabilities, including:
- Application and partner integration
- API management
- B2B integration
- Managed file transfer
- Building microservices
- High-speed messaging
- In-memory caching
With webMethods, you have an extensible, scalable and reliable backbone, running either in the cloud, on-premises or in hybrid scenarios, providing seamless integration for cloud, mobile, APIs and the IoT.
webMethods 10.4, our latest release, provides significant enhancements to many functional aspects of the product set. Read on to learn more.
webMethods Integration
webMethods Integration Server is the powerful core engine behind the entire webMethods suite, spanning business process management, B2B integration, managed file transfer, API management and more.
Our hybrid integration platform is easily scalable, enabling easy integration of your on-premises applications to SaaS applications, programming-model agnostic and multi-container capable. As a container, the platform ships with hundreds of useful prebuilt APIs, services, frameworks, an event-driven architecture and an in-memory data grid support to save you time.
The platform has a full range of connectors to support the most modern standards, such as OData, REST and the full complement of SOAP-based web services. Mapping and transformation functions are built in—especially useful when integrating big data sources.
The key features of this release include support for GraphQL with Integration Server. Integration Server enables developers to create a GraphQL schema that describes various types and fields in order to develop APIs that adhere to the GraphQL standard. Integration Server provides native support for JSON™ schema, allowing a developer to create a JSON document type based on a JSON schema. Software AG Designer can be used to publish REST API descriptors (Swagger) to webMethods API Gateway.
Integration Server offers enhanced support for the Swagger 2.0 standard while creating REST APIs. Integration Server is certified to communicate with Java® Message Service (JMS) providers that support AMQP protocol using QPID JMS client libraries.
webMethods Microservices Runtime has a decreased disk-size requirement and an improved start-up time. We provide a sample OpenShift script for Microservices Runtime, which can be customized to meet user’s needs so you can create Microservices Runtime pods and orchestrate them using OpenShift.
The new UI in webMethods ActiveTransfer supports enhancements for actions, logs and proxy server settings. Software AG Designer Service Development supports a new view called Deployment Status. The view shows the cloud deployment history with deployment status and a log to debug issues.
webMethods CloudStreams server supports the ability to associate one or more authentication schemes supported by SaaS applications or backend systems while creating a connection. It supports the Salesforce® Replay Events mechanism provided by Salesforce for message durability to retrieve and process lost events sent by Salesforce within the supported retention window.
The CloudStreams server supports OAuth 2.0 authentication flow using JSON Web Token (JWT). A JWT enables identity and security information to be shared across security domains.
Users can snoop on events on a Universal Messaging channel or queue and purge events from a channel or queue using the Command Central web user interface and command-line interface. Users also can publish events, including Protobuf events, on a Universal Messaging channel or queue using the Command Central web user interface and command-line interface. Universal Messaging sessions using the "horizontal scalability" feature now support automatic (re) connection to realm servers in the scalability set that are offline or unavailable when the session is created or initialized.
webMethods API Management
Software AG’s webMethods API Portal provides a comprehensive solution that allows the developer community to find, learn about, discuss and test an organization’s APIs. API Portal not only exposes API documentation to developers inside and outside your organization but also manages the developer onboarding process and lets developers use the exposed APIs for new and creative uses.
webMethods API Gateway securely exposes your APIs to consumer, third-party developers and other partners for use on the web, mobile and IoT applications. webMethods Microgateway is an independent offering—lightweight, agile and fast. It works with webMethods API Gateway or as a standalone solution to control API access to microservices in a distributed environment and supports service mesh architectures offering independent and sidecar deployments.
There are many API documentation enhancements, including enhanced import and export support in API Gateway to include all assets and configurations so that users can easily move the configurations across instances. The staging and promotion support in API Gateway has been enhanced and includes all assets and configurations so that users can easily move configurations across instances. For application identification, we have secured it to use certificates sent through the custom HTTP header. The custom HTTP header can be configured as an extended setting in API Gateway administration.
Also, API providers can be configured to invoke multiple APIs in parallel as part of one mashup step and aggregate the response that is passed to the next step. Similarly, responses of any mashup steps can be aggregated and sent as a single output to the client. API Gateway can be run within a Kubernetes® environment which provides a platform for automating deployment, scaling and operations of services.
With this release, API Gateway provides a dedicated screen to display groups of microgateways registered to it. API Gateway users are now able to retrieve details about microgateway available within the group as well as list of assets and configurations. User onboarding with approval flow is enhanced to include multi-level approval process.
API gallery page is enhanced to display grouping of APIs based on the community they are published to. API Portal now allows users to share their registered applications with a specific list of users or teams.
webMethods Microgateway provides support for Kubernetes with health and readiness checks and Prometheus™ metrics among others. Microgateway configuration capabilities have been enhanced such that it allows for provisioning an instance using a single YAML settings file. Microgateway supports API scoping and resource and method level policy enforcement. Microgateway provisioning can now include runtime alias configurations.
CentraSite users can now trigger promotion of APIs from an API Gateway instance to another. When there is more than one API Gateway instance available in the environment, you can choose the required instance to which the API must be promoted.
Suite enhancements
The webMethods suite includes enhancements that improve functionality across multiple products.
Before webMethods 10.4, Command Central restarted all runtime instances and related platform manager installations after applying all configuration changes. This behavior is updated when you use Command Central 10.4 together with Platform Manager 10.3 or higher. With this release, you can set Command Central to only restart runtime instances if they require a restart for the updates to be applied.
Software AG Command Central along with Platform Manager 10.4 can set template application to fail when configuration settings are not applied. To ensure backward compatibility, the old behavior is the default one. Software AG Command Central enables you to generate a template for a product instance that is hosted on Platform Manager 10.0 or higher by using a CLI command.
Default templates for installation and basic configuration of analytic engine and web service data collector using Command Central are now available on GitHub®. The task engine now supports the archiving of task instance data in a separate data store. Integration of business console with co-located task engine running on Integration Server has been stabilized. The database component configurator tool is rewritten to improve reliability and performance.
For more details, see the webMethods 10.4 Release Notes.