Developer Portal features

Developer Portal provides the following features:

• Branding and customization.

  Administrators can customize their portal’s logo, colors, and fonts to match their organization’s corporate identity. Administrators can further customize their portal by modifying pages, incorporating widgets, and changing the appearance and organization of APIs, adding custom pages, components, and labels.

• Support for three types of APIs.

  Developer Portal supports traditional SOAP-based APIs, REST-based APIs, and OData APIs. This support enables organizations to use their current investments in different types of APIs.

• Quick, secured provisioning of access tokens.

  Approval workflows simplify the provisioning of applications. These workflows enable the API provider to individually approve access token requests that developers submit from Developer Portal. API key, OAuth2, and JWT credentials are supported as part of this feature.

• Easy discovery and testing of APIs.

  Full-text search capabilities help developers quickly find APIs of interest. API descriptions and additional documentation, usage examples, and information about policies that are enforced at the API level provide more details to help developers decide whether to adopt a particular API. From there, developers can use the provided code samples and expected error and return codes to try out APIs from Developer Portal to see first-hand how the API works. APIs can be grouped and grouped based on various filters in the gallery for easier discovery. For example, providers group APIs in a large catalog by business domain, free versus paid, or public versus B2B partner. APIs can also be flagged based on maturity level (for example, beta versus production or release).

• Quick, secure onboarding of new users.

  Easy to configure approval workflows in the IBM webMethods Developer Portal graphical user interface to define how the user onboarding must take place, with or without confirmations.

• Platform to collaborate.

  Developer Portal provides a collaborative community environment where API consumers can rate APIs and contribute to open discussions with other developers.

• Support for custom assets.

  In addition to APIs and packages, you can publish assets of your choice to Developer Portal. The custom asset support helps you publish all required references for your consumers.

• Built-in usage analytics.

  Developer Portal provides the Dashboard feature that the Developer Portal Administrator, API Providers, and API Consumers can access based on their roles to view Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) based on the page views and API views by users, track total number of logins, the success and failure of logins, user registrations, and user audit log, study the API's invocations per user and its performance at run time, study the API invocation trends by response time, success and failure rates, and track the total API requests over a period, requests over time per API, and API request log. This information helps you understand how the APIs are being used, which in turn can help identify ways to improve users’ portal web experience and increase API adoption.

• Support for localization.

  Developer Portal supports localizing API information and description.

The IBM webMethods API management suite products include the following products.

• IBM webMethods Developer Portal.
  In Developer Portal, API consumers browse the catalog of APIs that a provider publishes. Consumers can sign up and request an access token to test the API.

  Users can view the API usage analytics data in the Developer Portal dashboard based on their privileges.

• IBM webMethods API Gateway.

  API Gateway enables an organization to securely expose APIs to external developers, partners, and other consumers for use in building their own applications on their desired platforms. It provides a dedicated, web-based user interface to perform all API administration tasks from the API creation, policy definition and activation, creation of applications, and API consumption. API Gateway gives you rich dashboard capabilities for API Analytics. APIs created in API Gateway can also be published to Developer Portal for external facing developers' consumption. API Gateway supports REST APIs, SOAP APIs, and WebSocket APIs, provides protection from malicious attacks, provides a complete run-time governance of APIs, and information about gateway-specific events and API-specific events.

The following diagram illustrates the communication flow between API Gateway and Developer Portal.