Tutorial Series: Accelerate delivery of API & Microservices with API Assembly

Prerequisites

• API Connect Toolkit 5071 with DataPower
• curl
• Git (optional)

Series Overview

I have too often falled into a trap thinking that a visual-style development tool will accelerate development of my project. At first, the idea looks promising with a fancy prototype and generated code, but as you need to tweak your code, you often run into issues and solving it turns into a 'stack-overflow / googling' exercise.

The right balance needs to be available - you need productive visual tools that solve the common problem and at the same time provide the flexibility to drop-down and write code when needed. Enter the API Connect assembly editor, which provides a visual policy flow experience with built-in programming constructs to help accelerate delivery of API and microservice implementations. This tool is not here to write your service implementation, but act as a 'gateway' to enforce API and microservice security policies, apply rate limits and perform payload / header manipulation before proxying to the service backend.

In this tutorial series, you will learn how to build a first-class API definition to secure and rate-limit service backends.

• 1. Best Practices using DataPower with API Connect Developer Toolkit
• 2. Build conditional flows for dynamic API execution
• 3. Write JavaScript to enrich API payloads
• 4. Handling API Errors
• 5. Protect access to API services with Auth0 & JWT
• 6. Protect access to APIs using OpenID Connect
• 7. Enforcing Rate Limits for APIs
• 8. Packaging APIs for deployment on Bluemix