Need a single place to develop, publish, monetise and promote your APIs? You’ve got it. Our Publisher Portal encompasses everything you need to manage your API lifecycle activities.
Driven by configurable workflows, it fast tracks your publisher’s actions and supports everything from collaborating over blueprints to developing, versioning and retiring your APIs. Better yet, acting as a central hub for all your management processes, it also:
- Provides ultimate flexibility around publishing, pricing and tracking your APIs
- Enables you to easily monitor their usage
- Allows you to monetise your APIs through our API Gateway and API Developer Portal
To make your API activity easy to keep on top of, every artifact, policy or configuration change in our Publisher Portal goes through an approval cycle for governance and moderation.
It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3:
- An artifact (like API proxies, packs and policies) is configured in the portal
- It is then sent to the relevant business user for approval
- Once approved and synced with the gateway, our Publisher Portal will automatically publish your APIs to the Developer Portal
To ensure a slick subscription process, all the prices and usage plans are easy to see - if you don’t want them on show though, publishers can create private plans exclusively for B2B developers.
Publisher portals have two very different aspects:
- Technical - which are managed by your internal developer community
- Business - like your API pricing
With our design though, neither are isolated; we have flawlessly integrated the two to create a seamless experience throughout.
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Key Features
- Create and organise individual and grouped APIs with packaging and branding
- Make APIs publicly available in the Developer Portal
- Monitor and manage API usage, users and groups
- Authenticate and authorise your APIs
- Set-up one or more API gateways and enforce security and usage policies
- Share policies across several APIs
- Build various usage plans, each with unique run-time rules
- Individually deploy and manage plans from different gateways on the same screen
- Get as close to real-time statistic visualisation as you can get
- Set advanced and granular role-based access control for all features
- Customise the appearance of your portal
- Make workflow amends to tailor APIs to your clients’ requirements
Publisher Portal?
FAQs
What is DigitMarketTM API Manager (DM-APIM)?
DigitMarketTM API Manager (DM-APIM) is a complete package to help manage your APIs and make them into tools that propel your business forward.
Our API Management product, “DigitMarketTM API Manager” has four components that work in unison to provide the following basic runtime functionality:
The Publisher Portal
The API publishers configure the APIs, API packs, usage plans, usage policies and so on using this portal. Key features:
- Create secure API proxies
- Create API packs from multiple APIs
- Advanced Policy library with facility to share policies across multiple APIs
- Workflow/approval cycles on policy lifecycle
- Configure transformations at API and resource levels
- Ability to create multiple usage plans with different set of runtime policies for each plan Ex: Basic, Gold, Silver, Platinum, etc
- Ability to selectively deploy and manage plans on different gateway runtime instances from a single screen
- Near-real-time statistics visualization
- Advanced and highly granular role-based access control for all features - API Visibility, management, publishing and consuming
The Developer Portal
The developers discover, explore, try out and subscribe to the publishers’ APIs using this portal. The publisher can tailor the appearance of the developer portal as per their needs. Key features:
- Developer self-registration
- Ability to search and navigate the portal with the same user experience of an online store; with clear listing of most popular APIs, What's new, API price, description, etc
- Facility to manage the subscriptions through an easy interface
- Ability for internal and external developers, API providers to quickly view statistics of their API usage
- Facility for API providers to easily expose/create APIs by proxying existing endpoints and attaching policy templates
- Help / support ticket system built-in for API developers to report issues, bugs, etc
The Gateway
The gateway enforces the policies defined by the publishers, validates the subscriptions, collects metrics, and enforces quotas. The gateway is configured and managed using the publisher portal. No coding or customization is required. Key features:
- Event-driven paradigm used to implement the gateway, hence high concurrencies can be achieved easily
- Policy enforcement (details of each policy is described in our answer to the next question)
- Cluster-wide policy enforcement
- Quota overrun alerts with configurable threshold
- Transaction recording for analytics
- Multi-gateway runtime architecture to support isolation of high-traffic, high-volume APIs. Configuration and management is central though
- Subscription validation and auto-renewal facility
OAuth Authentication Server
- Token management
- Supports OAuth custom grant types
What are the basic functionalities offered by the Developer Portal to different segments of API consumers?
Multiple types of consumers like internal developers, B2B Partners and external developers like apptrepreneurs and the general public can have features tailored for them in the developer portal. The configurable HTML files of the developer portal enable the publisher to tailor its appearance if the default appearance is not apt.
- Features applicable for Open API Economy model (External developers like Apptrepreneurs and general public)
- AppStore-like interface for easy discovery and subscription to APIs
- Explicit pricing information for public consumers with ability to hide pricing if required
- Automatic subscription renewal feature, if enabled for specific developers
- Workflow driven public developer verification to protect publishers from malicious developers
- Features applicable for B2B Partners
- Ability for API Publishers to on-board and provide access to partners on their behalf
- Can share the developer portal to B2B users as partner portal
- Features for internal developers
- Each API supports visibility option, so developer portal can support mix of internal and external APIs that are fully isolated from each other
- Ability for publishers to configure different usage plans/policies for the same API, one for internal and other for external developers
- Common features that is applicable for all types of consumers
- Integrated sandbox capability that allows publishers to easily create a playground for APIs. Developers can try out the API
- Integrated API documentation using hybrid approaches - static documentation and OpenAPI (Swagger) test client. Documentation can be uploaded in the form of HTML, therefore the appearance can be tailored as per publisher wish
- Statistics for API usage
- Quota usage in real-time
How customizable and configurable is the Developer Portal?
- DigitMarketTM API developer portal is fully customizable. A revamped developer portal can be published via the CMS feature in the publisher portal as all the capabilities of the former are available as APIs. The users can choose to rebrand the developer portal or change flows on the developer portal using this capability. The default developer portal template is provided as part of product that can be used as a reference to customize the new set of navigation flows
- Documentation can also be uploaded in customized templates while defining an API
- API Categorization and organizing is built into the developer portal; and is administered via the publisher portal
- Integrated Discussion forum that allows developers to ask questions, raise bugs, suggest features, etc
- Integrated Sandbox environment and “Try It” for quick exploration
- Ability to generate client code for different technologies based on the Swagger(OpenAPI) specification
Do you offer a multi-tenant architecture for the Developer and Publisher portals?
Yes, we offer an innovative multi-tenant architecture for publisher and developer portal. Large, geographically distributed enterprises would like to provide APIs to their community of consumers across different business units. DigitMarketTM API Manager supports multi-tenancy where one installation of the product supports a feature where in different API provider sub-organizations and consumer sub-organizations can be created. Each provider sub-organization has its own exclusive publisher portal and associated developer portal for its consumers. Each tenant, independent of other tenants can customize the APIs, look and feel of the portal, and do much more.
When customers want isolated environments for themselves, we provide the same. Certain customers will be hesitant to share the application instance with others. In such cases we provide a separate managed instance on the cloud, at a separate cost.
How are APIs published onto the Developer Portal?
DigitMarketTM API Manager Publisher and Developer Portals are driven by workflows. There are approval cycles for governing and moderating changes for every new artifact, policy or a configuration change. .Once the artifacts such as API proxies, packs, policies are configured on the publisher portal, it is submitted to the business user for approval. Once the configuration is approved, and synced with the gateway, publisher portal automatically publishes the APIs to the developer portal. The price plans, usage plans are explicitly shown to make the subscription process easier. Alternatively, publishers can choose to have hidden/private plans exclusively for B2B developers.
Do the portals support private B2B APIs?
Private B2B APIs between trading partners are common and must be managed. These APIs could be a part of a supply chain in manufacturing, in commerce between suppliers and retailers, or in healthcare or life sciences ecosystems.
Specific APIs and/or specific API features can be hidden from the general public by API publishers on the Developer Portal. Each API usage plan has visibility settings that allow granular configuration of APIs. For some B2B scenarios, we configure two-way SSL with mutual authentication where both the parties are known to each other. Also, as both the provider and consumer endpoints are known to each other, we configure additional security policies such as IP white-listing. Some of our clients prefer to deploy an instance of API gateway in a separate VPN-enabled network over the Internet, which is not visible to the general public. Some other clients prefer to combine partner-specific APIs with the Open API developer portal.
An extensible adapter SDK is also provided that allows creation of custom adapter for any B2B specific applications/protocols. Though the adapter for specific B2B protocol does not exist now, such as EDI, RosettaNet, etc, one time activity of adapter development as part of a project will help us re-use it across other instances where there is a need for those protocols.
How is Documentation Created and Reviewed in the API User Portal?
If the API is configured to use the documentation, the viewer is available inside the Developer Portal. Documentation is automatically uploaded from when the page is loaded. The API Manager who configures the documentation must have the right user account. However, anyone can have access to the documentation.
