Integration Modelling

When developing microservices, the integration of other services via REST API is a highly popular scenario. Visualizing integrations to external services in a model, helps to keep the overview of the dependencies a service has, and therefore, eases the managing of those dependencies.

Integration Modelling in IBM Industry Solutions Workbench helps, to easily manage integrations to external services within the Solution Designer UI. By providing auto-generated code, it also supports during the implementation of integration logic.

The extension is available for the following stacks:

• Java Spring Boot Stack 2.0.0
• Java Spring Boot Stack 1.0.0 (only for Domain services and always enabled)
• NodeJS TypeScript Stack (only for Domain services and always enabled)

Modelling of integrations is organized in integration namespaces, where each namespace will represent the integration to one external service. It allows to model integration services, entities and other items in order to fully cover the integration use case. Using API Dependencies also offers the capability to upload REST API specifications, which describe the API provided by the external service, which helps to ensure that the APIs are used correctly. To learn more about the modelling of integration use cases please see Modelling Integrations. In Integration namespaces all REST API based services can be easily integrated. Integrated services are not forced to be developed by IBM Industry Solutions Workbench.

When implementing integration use cases, consumers need to take care, that requests to the external service are implemented correctly. With the help of the uploaded REST API specifications, it can be ensured, that the implementation matches the describe request and response structures. To learn more about this part, please check Implement integration services (Java) or Implement integration services (TypeScript).