Apiman Developer Guide

Are you interested in contributing to the development of Apiman? Maybe you want to embed the project in your own solution? In either case, this is the guide for you.

This section describes a number of resources that are useful if you wish to contribute code to Apiman.

It is likely also a good starting point for those wishing to provide functionality by implementing a plugin, although more information about plugins can be found in the 'Plugins' section.

The basic architecture of apiman is fairly straightforward. There are several WARs that make up the default Apiman installation.

These include:

The API Manager REST back-end WAR is responsible for exposing a set of REST endpoints that make up the API Manager REST interface.

The API Manager UI uses this REST API directly when the user manages the various entities in the data model.

The API Manager UI is a client-only AngularJS application. Aside from authentication related activities, this WAR only contains HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The UI uses the browser to make direct, authenticated calls to the REST endpoints exposed by the API Manager REST back-end WAR.

The API Gateway Config exposes the standard apiman Gateway REST API so that the API Gateway can be remotely configured. This is the REST API that the API Manager uses whenever a user publishes an API or registers a Client App. It is responsible for configuring the API Gateway’s embedded Policy Engine.

The API Gateway is the primary runtime component of apiman and is implemented as a servlet that embeds the apiman Policy Engine.

All requests to the API Gateway WAR are assumed to be intended for managed APIs previously published to it.

We’re rather IDE agnostic, so contributors should feel free to use whatever tools they feel most comfortable with.

At the time of this writing, the core Apiman developers mostly use IntelliJ IDEA.

Building Apiman should be a simple matter of doing a standard Maven build:

This will do a full build of Apiman and execute all unit tests. However, the result will not include a ready-to-run version of Apiman. For that, you may want to try the following:

This command will do a full apiman build, but will also download WildFly and install Apiman into it. The result will be a fully configured installation of Apiman running in WildFly.

The location of this WildFly install will be here:

At this point you can test Apiman by simply running WildFly from the above location using a command something like this: