APIs have become an essential and key success factor for any business. Businesses do not operate as silos anymore, therefore each business depends on B2B communications. In technical terms, different systems/applications need to communicate with each other to fulfill various business requirements. Publishing rich business APIs is the answer to the above requirements.

Architects and developers who implement APIs prefer to use REST as the standard by looking at the simplicity and flexibility it provides for the end-users of the API and use lightweight message formats like JSON and POX. Most enterprises struggle to expose RESTful APIs due to various technical limitations and spend more time to architect and implement the same.

This workshop focuses on how to expose your heterogeneous back-end services as a RESTful API in a quick and easy but architecturally accurate way, using the WSO2 Platform.

Presented by:

Samisa Abeysinghe, VP, Engineering, WSO2

With over 9 years industry experience, Samisa has experience working for both software systems integrators and software vendors with global exposure. He has been a committer of the Apache Web services project, since May 2004, and initiated the Apache Axis2/C project. Samisa has published many articles, and has spoken at numerous industry conferences, including ApacheCon, ZendCon, IndicThreads, and more. He has also published two books: RESTFul PHP Web Services, and PHP Team development.

Asanka Abeysinghe, Director, Solutions Architecture, WSO2

Asanka is a committer at the Apache software foundation, a contributor to the Apache Synapse project and has over 10 years experience developing and deploying services oriented architectures and scalable distributed systems. Adept in Java technologies and C/C++ on both Linux and Windows platforms, Asanka specializes in working with enterprise customers in financial services and other industries to design and architect mission critical applications, business integration and mobile solutions.

Topics to be covered:

• API Architecture

  This session takes a business requirement and explains how to design a RESTful API using basic REST methods and architect it by leveraging the existing IT infrastructure. It addresses how to enhance the API using techniques like HyperMedia. This session also covers architecture best practices on designing APIs.

• API Gateway pattern using WSO2 ESB

  Discuss how to use WSO2 ESB and expose back-end services as a RESTful API. ESB is used as a gateway. It not only publishes the API but also secure the API using desired security protocols like HTTP basic auth or OAuth. This session introduces the latest first-level API configuration added to WSO2 ESB.

• Writing REST services

  This topic covers how to publish RESTful APIs by writing services with a REST binding using the Java API, JAX-RS. WSO2 Application Server provides functionality to host JAX-RS services.

• RESTful Data Access

  Data entities and resources in REST have a strong relationship. Most API architects like to expose the entities as a resource and provide the CRUD operations using REST methods. WSO2 Data Services Server provides a OOTB functionality to do this in few clicks, as demonstrated in this session.

• Beyond the APIs

  How can architects take APIs to the enterprise which business users can leverage for better ROI?
  This session will discuss a few enterprise API patterns including YBaaS (Your Business as a Service). Cloud provides a better infrastructure for API hosting with Cloud features like multi-tenancy, billing and metering offering better control over the APIs. Overall, this pattern covers how vertical PaaS takes business APIs into the enterprise.

This workshop is aimed at technical and business architects who design APIs and developers who build APIs for different business domains.