Tuesday, November 21, 2017

CA API Policy Manager - Revision History

CA API Policy Manager is the user interface for the CA API Gateway. It is used to construct web service and XML application policies, manage policy users, configure identity bridging, and configure, audit, and monitor the CA API Gateway. Pretty useful tool, though it's a "eighties" thick client. 

It has tons of functions though, and they become quite useful at times. Today, a developer in my client's side changed something to an existing API, but couldn't tell me exactly what he has changed. 

Well ... typical. Vendors are paid to spend time to discover/explore/clean-up what has been messed up.  


Luckily, the Policy Manager has a Revision History to each API.



It can show a history of the changes made. What's best is one can choose 2 historic APIs and make comparisons.




What's even better is it can pin-point which assertion(s) within the API has been modified. A visual output in RAW XML format can even be shown.



This function saves me big time!


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Thursday, November 2, 2017

API Slug

 I was playing with Tyk since they are offering 50.000 API calls / day FOC. What can you ask for?


While creating a test API, I came across a term "API Slug". What's that?

API IDs are internally unique but hard to remember. These are not useful for users, so you can replace them with a slug.



I find this developer friendly, as opposed to GUID as shown below.



Tyk was built because other open source API Gateways in the market come with dependencies and bloat, attempting to be too many things to too many people. Tyk is focused, simple and does one thing well - protecting your API from unauthorised access.

Another open source product ... let's see how long they will stay being open source.

These days, I make it a habit to fork frequently. You never know when the source will be closed.

When $ comes and put on your table, let's see whether or not you'll stay true to yourself - the original dream of building a whole-class open source product for the open source community.

We are all human beings.



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