Developing your APIs and applications

You develop APIs by using the IBM® API Connect developer toolkit.

The API Connect developer toolkit provides both the API Designer user interface and a command line interface that you can use to develop APIs and publish them to API Connect.

Security tip: While developing your API, remember to protect sensitive data that might be exposed to consuming applications. For information on configuring security requirements for your APIs, see Enforcing security requirements on an API.

You publish APIs by including them in a "product" and then publishing that product. Define your APIs and products by creating and validating YAML definition files in your local file system, or using the API Connect UI. You can then interact with API Connect using either the UI or the toolkit commands.

Note: In the The Help icon.Help page of the API Manager, and API Designer user interfaces, there's a Product information tile that you can click to find out information about your product versions, as well as Git information about the package versions being used. Note that the API Designer product information is based on its associated management server, but the Git information is based on where it was downloaded from.

The developer toolkit is described in detail in the following subsections: