Introduction:
This article provides an overview of creating and managing API-led Integrations on webMethods.io Integration. This article requires a prior understanding of REST. It is good to have an understanding of RESTful best practices also.
Pre-requisites:
Please go through the documentation of REST API Builder to understand about creating REST APIs on webMethods.io Integration.
API-led Integrations:
webMethods.io Integration offers the integration capabilities covering multiple personas – Citizen, Ad-hoc, Digital Integrators and Integration Specialists. webMethods.io Integration lets you create integrations that can be invoked with different patterns. For example,
On-demand: An integration that can be invoked with a webhook with or without a payload on a need basis. For example, with a HTTP Callback endpoint.
Citizen, Digital integrators in general would like to spend very little time building integrations and APIs. Webhooks is a quick way of building such integrations. Webhooks supports GET and POST methods with auth token for authentication as a query parameter. These are in general implemented with workflows.
API-led Integrations with complex integration logic can be implemented using Integration Flows. webMethods.io Integration allows us to create REST Data Models/resources from JSON/XML samples or Swagger specifications, and re-use them in the integrations. These are referred to as documents.
webMethods.io Integration supports both Contract first – creating API from API Descriptor, i.e., from swagger and Implementation first – create API from the workflows or Integrations.
Contract first approach by default would create the resource data models whereas Implementation first approach would require the developer to create the data models as documents. Both approaches would allow the developers to choose either workflow or Integration Flow as the implementation for any method or operation (CRUD operations POST, GET, PUT, DELETE methods respectively). For example,
Workflows offer content negotiation with JSON and JSON extended content types. Integration flows offers the advanced API-led integration use cases with the wider support for content types – JSON, XML, HTML, Form Data.
Follow RESTful best practices for API development as much as possible. Keep the URIs clean – resources with plural names. Implement the APIs to support multiple content types – e.g., JSON/XML.
Adopt Richardson Maturity Model while implementing APIs as much as possible.
