Solution Capabilities
Natural API Management delivers capabilities to develop, integrate, manage, protect, engage and monitor APIs in the organization.
The following is a summary of the capabilities provided by the solution:
AdaptersThe adapters layer provides the ability to connect to Natural hosts in order to expose/reuse Natural business rules as APIs. The Natural business rules are exposed by Natural RPC servers allowing IDL (Interface Description Language) object generation.
Integration The integration layer enables API adapters to integrate the services allowing the use of heterogeneous technologies. Web services can be deployed directly from IDLs extracted from Natural applications or based on an EntireX adapter connection generated into the Integration Server (generated on the adapters layer).
Web Service Repository The repository provides management facilities for the assets that are developed and deployed from Natural applications and others. Based on web services deployed from the integration layer, the asset should be registered in and published to the repository (CentraSite) to be available for further consumption, and also to control the entire API lifecycle.
Creation of an enterprise catalog of internal and external APIs.
Documentation of SOAP and REST APIs.
Management of the API provider workflow: access token request approvals for API keys and OAuth2.
Manage the entire API lifecycle from design until retirement.
API virtualization and configuration/enforcement of runtime policies.
API usage analysis at runtime through dashboards reports and traffic.
API Management The API Management layer enables companies to unlock the business value of their unique Natural applications, while also supporting new devices and technologies, hybrid integration, Internet of Things, and service governance initiatives. Thus, existing Natural functionality can be reused as APIs on the new services, giving agility for developers to meet business demands quickly.
This layer also enables monitoring, policies enforcement, authorization/authentication, mediation, transformation, and consumption of services delivered.
The highlights for API managers are:
Secure and mediate traffic between API consumers/users and back-end applications.
Collection of performance metrics for dynamic dashboards and accounting for billing.
Realize statistics about API usage with added analytics and reporting.
Automated documentation publishing to the API-Portal.
API creation, packaging, and publishing.
API Mediation and Gateway webMethods Mediator provides a service intermediary that enforces the runtime policies you create in the web services repository (CentraSite). Mediator also virtualizes shared services, making it easy to change services when required.
Combined with CentraSite, Mediator provides end-to-end governance of all your services and APIs from development to runtime. Combined with webMethods Enterprise Gateway, Mediator provides comprehensive API Gateway functionality. The key capabilities offered are:
Use it as a central runtime policy enforcement point for APIs.
Enforce security, traffic management, monitoring and SLA management policies.
Virtualize services to decouple API consumers/users from APIs providers.
Provide intelligent routing and load balancing of APIs requests.
Collect analytical data on API consumption/usage and policy evaluation.
Send selected events to the webMethods Event Bus Infrastructure for processing and immediate action.
SOAP-to-REST transformation.
Performance.
Protocol switching.
Message transformation.
Consumer provisioning.
Message validation.
Traffic management.
SLA monitoring.
Security.
API key enforcement.
Smart policy provisioning.
Standards support.
API-Portal API-Portal provides a consumer-centric user interface for the discovery of APIs. The portal exposes API documentation to third-party developers, manages the developer on-boarding process, and allows these developers to use the exposed APIs for creative new uses. When developers leverage your APIs with new mashups and apps or to support new devices, your reach is extended, and new channels are opened up to your corporate assets. The key capabilities offered are:
Full API documentation.
Customizable branding of the Portal interface.
Automatic synchronization of documentation from the web services repository.
API support for REST and SOAP based APIs.
Integrated API testing.
Built-in APIs usage analytics.
Full text search capabilities to find the desired APIs.
Responsive design for both desktop and mobile web-based administration interface.
API grouping.
Multiple deployment options: behind the firewall, in the DMZ, in your private cloud.
Built-in workflows for an approval process to manage API access requests.
Sign up to track specific APIs to automatically receive notices of changes.
To support environments that require higher levels of availability and performance, Natural API Management provides support for cluster scenarios in some of its components (for example, Mediation, Gateway, engagement layer).
