Accessing Google Apigee with LightWave
Updated: Dec 29, 2022
Many organizations are starting to adopt API Gateways as part of their application infrastructure. This article provides a quick overview of API Gateway and Google’s Apigee API and how to interface to it from NonStop applications using LightWave.
What is Apigee?
Apigee is a platform / API gateway for developing and managing APIs. It provides an abstraction or encapsulation of an enterprise’s backend services and provides add-on values such as security, analytics, among others. Apigee the company was originally founded in 2004 in Silicon Valley and provided API management software. It was later acquired by Google 2016 and is now commonly referred to as “Google Cloud’s Apigee API Platform.”
Traditional web service access
It is very common that accesses to backend services are made available as a set of endpoints. Client applications then make requests directly to these endpoints using HTTP/HTTPS, which normally provide SOAP or REST services that return data in XML or JSON. By exposing the backend services directly to the external environment, any changes in the backend services will require additional changes in all the client applications.
Benefits of an API Gateway
Instead of having external applications consume backend services directly, one can access the services through an API Gateway. The API Gateway acts as a single-entry point into a system or network, allowing external client applications to access the services consistently via a uniform interface. This approach allows changes on the backend services without affecting the public client API.
Why use Apigee?
Apigee is an API Gateway that includes monitoring, analytics, and developer services that together provide a comprehensive infrastructure for API creation, security, management, and operations. It isolates the client application from the backend services, and enables the services to be changed without affecting the public API. You can also use Apigee policies to add functionality to a service, without having to make any changes to the backend service, such as security, data transformations or filtering. Apigee also provides additional values such as analytics, monetization, as well as other features. These are some of the main reasons why many corporations are adopting the Apigee API platform. (The pervasiveness is also encouraged by the fact that Google is the parent company behind this technology).
LightWave Client – The easy way to access Apigee API
LightWave Client provides an easy way for NonStop applications to access RESTful APIs. We recently worked with one of our NonStop customers using LightWave Client to connect to Apigee. Through the import of a Swagger file, the RESTful API definitions were generated within LightWave Client in a matter of minutes. This was then followed by the DDL generation feature of LightWave Client, which creates the needed IPM definition for a NonStop application to access the Apigee gateway through the LightWave Client runtime environment. Using LightWave Client, we were able to help our customer complete a successful Proof Of Concept (POC) in a matter of hours, and the customer was then able to build the application based on the POC result.
Summary
If you have a need to access an API Gateway, or any other REST services, from your NonStop applications, get in touch with us to see how easy it is with LightWave Client.
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Phil Ly is the president and founder of TIC Software, a New York-based company specializing in software and services that integrate NonStop with the latest technologies, including Web Services, .NET and Java. Prior to founding TIC in 1983, Phil worked for Tandem Computer in technical support and software development.