Posts tagged with api-manager

As you may know, apiman has long supported custom policies provided by users. If you aren’t familiar with apiman plugins, you can find more about them by clicking here.

As of version 1.1.5.Final, plugins are now even more useful. You can provide custom implementations of various core apiman system components via plugins. This allows users to customize apiman easily, without any changes to the classpath and without rebuilding the core apiman application.

In this blog post I’ll explain how it works.

A core feature of any good API Management solution is the recording of and reporting on interesting metrics related to API requests. Because apiman acts as a central Gateway for all managed API traffic, it is the perfect location to record information about each and every request. This allows it to report on interesting data it has recorded, related to response times, successful vs. failed requests, total number of requests broken down by time, consumer id, or plan used. As you can imagine, this is extremely valuable information, and it is a bit embarrassing that we haven’t offered this functionality until now!

But that gap is finally filled with version 1.1.4.Final.

One of the weaknesses we’ve had in apiman until now is that API providers didn’t have any way to document how to consume their APIs. Well that has all changed with version 1.1.3.Final. Now you can upload a Swagger spec document for your API. If you do, consumers will be able to browse your API documentation directly in the apiman UI.

I think we can all agree that this is a welcome change and really improves the usability of the system, particularly from the perspective of the client app developer (aka the API consumer).