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

Creating a GraphQL API

So far, you have created various types of API proxies using API Connect, so creating a new API should be easy. When you create a GraphQL API, there are a few different checkpoints that you will become familiar with. In this section, you will be working with a GraphQL server that is providing FHIR Patient resource data. A few of the things you will be learning about are as follows:

  • How nested calls are triggered by a single API
  • How throttling prevents usage spikes
  • How to estimate the cost of running a complex query
  • Where to establish rate limits since GraphQL APIs are not like traditional APIs

The following diagram shows how the client interacts with API Connect's GraphQL implementation and with the GraphQL server:

Figure 9.2 – High-level GraphQL flow

The preceding diagram also shows you how a query is passed in and goes through a series of checks before API Connect forwards the query to the GraphQL...