Book Image

Digital Transformation and Modernization with IBM API Connect

By : Bryon Kataoka, James Brennan, Ashish Aggarwal
Book Image

Digital Transformation and Modernization with IBM API Connect

By: Bryon Kataoka, James Brennan, Ashish Aggarwal

Overview of this book

IBM API Connect enables organizations to drive digital innovation using its scalable and robust API management capabilities across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. With API Connect's security, flexibility, and high performance, you'll be able to meet the needs of your enterprise and clients by extending your API footprint. This book provides a complete roadmap to create, manage, govern, and publish your APIs. You'll start by learning about API Connect components, such as API managers, developer portals, gateways, and analytics subsystems, as well as the management capabilities provided by CLI commands. You’ll then develop APIs using OpenAPI and discover how you can enhance them with logic policies. The book shows you how to modernize SOAP and FHIR REST services as secure APIs with authentication, OAuth2/OpenID, and JWT, and demonstrates how API Connect provides safeguards for GraphQL APIs as well as published APIs that are easy to discover and well documented. As you advance, the book guides you in generating unit tests that supplement DevOps pipelines using Git and Jenkins for improved agility, and concludes with best practices for implementing API governance and customizing API Connect components. By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to transform your business by speeding up the time-to-market of your products and increase the ROI for your enterprise.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: Digital Transformation and API Connect
5
Section 2: Agility in Development
15
Section 3: DevOps Pipelines and What's Next

Why GraphQL?

Before you learn about the benefits of GraphQL, you might be wondering, what is GraphQL? GraphQL is a query language but not for querying databases. It's a query language for APIs, but in many cases, it may eventually interface with databases. From an API consumer's perspective, it's a query language for the client to specify which data fields it needs.

The motivation for the consumer to use GraphQL surrounds collecting payload data that's returned from APIs. In some cases, you receive more data than what is necessary and that impacts bandwidth. In other cases, you don't get enough data and need to create additional APIs to fetch additional data. Those two cases are referred to as over-fetching and under-fetching. Let's understand each of them:

  • Over-fetching happens when an API returns data elements you do not need nor want. This extraneous information can be just ignored but has a cost, especially if there are lots of additional...