What Ready! API integration brings to the WSO2 API Manager Platform

WSO2 API Manager is a complete free and opensource solution that has a rich set of features for API Creation, Publication and the complete API Lifecycle management with features to secure the API invocation. All these features come from the WSO2 platform and from the core features used in the products such as WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus, WSO2 Identity Server and WSO2 Governance Registry. In addition to that, the API Management platform utilizes the power of the WSO2 Data Analytics server for the API statistics analytics.

The above features of API Manager focuses more towards the development and run time aspects of the complete API development lifecycle. Apart from the above main states of a API development lifecycle, the other most important state is the Testing state. 

From this post, I will talk about the WSO2 API Manager and its integration with the Ready! API(by SmartBear) and what capabilities it brings to the WSO2 API Manager platform.

I'm assuming that everyone who reads this post would have some level of understanding about WSO2 API Manager and how it operates. I'm not going to explain the basics of WSO2 API Manager from this post. For more information about the API Manager product, please visit the product home page.

Ready! API

Ready! API is a platform of API testing tools by SmartBear which combines the power of SoapUI NG Pro, LoadUI NG Pro, Secure, ServiceV, and API Monitoring in AlertSite into a single bundle to give its users the power of functional testing, performance testing to post-deployment monitoring. For more information about Ready! API, please visit the Ready! API product overview page.

Ready! API Integration

Lets look at what Ready! API brings to the WSO2 Platform.

API testing is one of the key aspects of the API Development lifecycle. Any API Management solution would have integrated tools for API testing but most would lack the ability to conduct a complete API testing that a commercial tool would give. Most of the embedded tools would only have the capability of doing basic testing to get an idea about the request/response as well as to try out the different resources exposed from the API.

With the above points in play, it is important that the commercial API testing tools in the market could integrate with your solution to give the users the ability to carryout testing at will. We have done the same by making our API Management solution integrate with Ready! API, to give the ultimate API testing experience.

WSO2 Ready API Plugin

We have developed a plugin for the Ready! API to integrate with WSO2 API Manager and discover the APIs published in the Store. The plugin helps its users to select the APIs that needs to be imported using its inbuilt API Store browser and does all the work from creating the project, creating the sample requests to creating the load tests in LoadUI.  The plugin has been deployed to the SmartBear plugin repository so that Ready! API users would have the best user experience when using the WSO2 Ready API Plugin. For more information, please visit the SmartBear plugin repository and the github project of the WSO2 Ready API Plugin.

Conclusion

The development of the WSO2 Ready API Plugin has helped the WSO2 API Management platform to move to the next level by being able to integrate with a commercial API testing platform. The advantages of the Ready! API platform, including its core components of SoapUI NG Pro, LoadUI NG Pro, Secure, ServiceV, and API Monitoring in AlertSite have strengthened the API development lifecycle of the WSO2 API Management Platform.