The Application Programming Interface (API) services for IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise provides you with the ability to manage your instances by using third-party applications. As the heading suggests, different APIs are available for this.
The first building block of the APIs is the REST API; it is flexible and simple to use, and implements clients for providing Representational State Transfer (REST) based endpoints. The REST API can be used for applications such as JAX-WS, SOA, XUL, and cURL.
Second, there is the Java API which is a wrapper around the REST API; each Java API method calls the REST API in turn.
Lastly there is the Command Line Interface (CLI) API which is ideal for scripting languages such as Shell and PERL. The CLI API calls the Java API, which in turn calls the REST API.
The following figure depicts the different APIs and their interdependence.