API Gateway overview

webMethods API Gateway features

webMethods API Gateway provides these key features:

Support for different types of APIs

webMethods API Gateway supports REST-based APIs, SOAP-based APIs, WebSocket APIs, OData APIs, and GraphQL APIs. This support enables organizations to use their current investments in SOAP-based APIs while you adopt REST for new APIs. The API Gateway's SOAP to REST transformation feature enables an API provider to show parts of the SOAP API or show the complete SOAP API with RESTful interface. webMethods API Gateway lets you customize the way the SOAP operations are displayed as REST resources.

Secure APIs

webMethods API Gateway protects APIs from malicious attacks that are initiated by external client applications. Administrators can secure traffic between API consumer requests and the execution of services on API Gateway. Administrators do so by filtering requests coming from particular IP addresses and blocklisting specified IP addresses, detecting and filtering requests coming from particular mobile devices.

Policy enforcement

webMethods API Gateway provides complete runtime governance of APIs. API Gateway enforces access tokens such as API key check, OAuth2 token, and operational policies such as security policies for runtime requests between applications and local services. API providers can enforce security, traffic management, monitoring, and SLA management policies, can transform requests and responses into expected formats, and collect events metrics on API consumption and policy evaluation. API policies can be defined globally and applied to a set of APIs. You can also define policy templates that can be applied across APIs by using API Gateway

Mediation

webMethods API Gateway provides routing policies such as content-based, and conditional routing, for runtime requests between applications and local services. These policies perform routing and load balancing of incoming requests to an API.

Message transformation

webMethods API Gateway lets you configure an API and to transform the request and response messages to suit your requirements. To do this configuration and transformation, you can specify an XSLT file to transform messages during the mediation process. You can also configure an API to start Integration Server services to pre-process or post-process the request or response messages.

Easy discovery and testing of APIs

webMethods API Gateway provides filter capabilities to quickly find APIs of interest. API descriptions and more documentation, usage examples, and information about policies that are enforced at the API level provide more details to the developers that help them decide whether to adopt a particular API. Developers can use the provided samples and expected error and return codes to see how the API works.

Usage analytics

webMethods API Gateway provides information about Gateway-specific events and API-specific events, details about which APIs are more popular than others. The Gateway-specific events information is available by way of dashboards to users. With this information, providers can understand how their APIs are being used, which in turn can help identify ways of improving their users' experience and increase API adoption.

Packages and plans

webMethods API Gateway provides capabilities to create and manage packages and plans. Packages and plans help the API providers in providing tiered access to their APIs to allow different service levels and pricing plans. Users can view the details of the package, such as included APIs and associated plans. Plans provide information about pricing and quality of service terms that are defined within them. Consumers can subscribe to any plan available under the package, based on their business needs.

Functional privileges

webMethods API Gateway allows you to assign functional privileges to a user or group (LDAP or local) using teams. The functional privileges are grouped to form a team, which is associated to a group. You must have a functional privilege that is assigned to perform any of the key webMethods API Gateway features.

API Mashups

webMethods API Gateway allows you to consolidate services and expose them as a single service. You can create API mashups that extend an API operation by grouping it with other API operations available in webMethods API Gateway.

Secure inter-component communication

API Gateway follows the best practices for a secure inter-component communication using mTLS.