See what’s new in Integration, API, B2B and more

webMethods, Software AG's API acceleration platform, empowers building solutions on the top-rated hybrid integration platform and integrating cloud-based apps and on-premises systems without coding. With webMethods, you can use microservices-style architecture to deliver and scale new integrations faster and leverage API Management for promoting and protecting access to APIs. Integrating existing and new technologies with the Internet of Things (IoT) and having multiple deployment options drives agility and innovation to ensure business growth.

webMethods includes a broad collection of capabilities, including application and partner integration, API management, B2B integration, managed file transfer, microservices, high-speed messaging, and in-memory caching. With webMethods, you have an extensible, scalable and reliable backbone - running either in the cloud, on-premises or in hybrid scenarios – providing seamless integration for cloud, mobile, APIs, and IoT.

Integration, B2B and Process Management

webMethods Integration Server is the powerful core engine behind webMethods, spanning business process management, B2B integration, managed file transfer, API management, and more. Our hybrid integration platform is easily scalable, enabling easy integration of your on-premises applications to SaaS applications, programming-model agnostic, and multi-container capable. As a container, the platform ships with hundreds of pre-built, useful APIs, services, frameworks, EDA, and in-memory data grid support to save you time.

This platform has a full range of connectors to support the most modern standards, such as OData, REST, and the full complement of SOAP-based Web-service support. Mapping and transformation functions are built-in, which is especially useful when integrating big data sources.

Here are the key highlights for this release:

Integration Server allows developers to create the REST consumer from a given Swagger v2.0 API descriptor. The REST consumer provides support for consumer APIs for all resources and operations defined within the Swagger file. Integration Server provides native support for MQTT by allowing developers to define an MQTT-based trigger and provides public services for MQTT-based pub/sub messaging with an MQTT server. Integration Server provides support for a new REST-based API for administration purposes. This API enhances the DevOps capabilities of Integration Server. Integration Server can authenticate incoming Webservice requests using Kerberos credentials at the transport layer.

When publishing SOAP or REST-based APIs to webMethods API Gateway, developers can now specify the API name and version. Integration Server supports Solace as a JMS provider and can send and receive data using Solace messaging infrastructure. Integration Server also provides support for developers to write an interceptor that intercepts outbound HTTP and SOAP consumer calls. Developers can then capture raw outgoing requests and responses in XML/JSON format using this outbound interceptor function.

Integration Server now provides the ability to establish time-setting for different JWT token providers which allows Integration Server to factor the time difference between the token issuer and the verifier.

Designer Service Development allows developers to develop a REST consumer by providing the Swagger v2.0 interface document for a REST API provider. Software AG has launched a new lightweight development tool called webMethods Service Designer. The Service Designer combines the Service Development plug-in from Designer with Microservices Runtime and the Unit Test Framework. Service Designer can be downloaded from the Software AG TECHcommunity website. Software AG Designer Service Development allows developers to define flat file schema using a graphical wizard. This feature provides an easy-to-use mechanism for defining complex flat file schemas. In collaboration with Integration Server, Software AG Designer enhances the performance of data-fetching for GraphQL by providing support for GraphQL data loaders. Software AG Designer is tested and supported with the new Eclipse version 4.11.

CloudStreams Server now supports Server Name Indication (SNI) for Applications/Platforms websites. SNI allows multiple websites to exist on the same IP address. Without SNI, each hostname would require its IP address for an SSL certificate to be installed. However, SNI solves this problem. CloudStreams now provides SNI supported connection with configurable parameters such as 'Enable SNI' and 'SNI Server Name'. CloudStreams Server also provides the ability to handle listener runtime errors to recover from unwarranted error events for each SaaS application/provider at the CloudStreams Connector listener level. CloudStreams Connector Development plug-in now supports authentication type “OAuth V2.0 (Authorization Code Flow)" and "OAuth V2.0 (JWT Flow)" as part of the authentications type dropdown. The connector developer can use this new authentication type while developing connectors for a SaaS application that supports the same authentication mechanism.

The full-text search support, which was being used by many customers, was part of the New Data Steward UI and is now available with the Current Nova UI which will benefit a lot of existing implementations as well. This release also includes many Data Quality enhancements. webMethods OneData now supports the REST JSON-based data load capability to accommodate the same data object in different levels of hierarchy in a non-recursive conceptual object.

Universal Messaging allows a user to purge a range of event IDs or a single event ID on a queue. This means that purging of events on queues is possible through Enterprise Manager, Command Central and the client API, in the same way as for purging events on channels. In Universal Messaging, it is possible to monitor both asynchronous and synchronous subscription to a specific queue similar to the monitoring of connections to durable subscribers. The JMS Engine of Universal Messaging has the ability to automatically purge individual events from channels whose consumers are exclusively using durable subscriptions of type Shared or Serial. Universal Messaging and Digital Event Services have removed the deprecated priority durable which is replaced with the serial durable.

With Command Central, it is easy to import composite and micro templates from your own repository or from the default Software AG’s GitHub repository. The default templates can be found at:

https://github.com/SoftwareAG/sagdevops-templates-repo

From release 10.5, you can save a product instance as a template using the Command Central user interface. In Command Central 10.5, you can save a product instance from the instance view of an installed product. This template will contain all configurations that are default and/or applied to the product. Stacks and layers are now available out of the beta state. This includes functionality such as creating stacks and layers based on micro templates, CRUD operations and control the database schemas for the products by using the database layer in a stack.

Delegated administration rights are now available for both external and internal users in webMethods Active Transfer. Monitoring and Agents features are available in the new Active Transfer interface. webMethods Active Transfer Server now can archive transaction data with the following databases – Oracle, MS SQL and MySQL.

The AgileApps platform is able to send SAML assertions to MashZone to render MashZone dashboards on the AgileApps user interface. Users can customize the number of columns when viewing records in the new AgileApps UI. It applies to all views including custom object views, system object views, and system created views. Users can invoke Integration Server services from business rules using the new action Invoke IS Service which is available in the Actions to Perform option under Event Rules. Application Designers can configure invocation of Integration Server services on execution of the business rules with which it is associated. The classical Process Engine supports hosting on a Docker container, and can also be initialized in the Microservices Runtime. The process archiving feature of Process Engine is enhanced to include the parent-child relationship between the parent process and sub-processes. Task Engine now provides archival of all the Task data.

Terracotta Ehcache supports Write Behind which is asynchronous writing of data to systems of record. Cache and systems of record are kept in sync without impacting responsiveness to the user. Terracotta 10.5 clients for both cache and store can co-exist with any BigMemory Max 4.3. x client. A single application can now use both BigMemory Max, Terracotta Ehcache and Terracotta Store, allowing gradual migration to Terracotta.

API Management & Microservices

Software AG’s webMethods API Portal provides a comprehensive solution that allows the developer community to find, learn about, discuss, and test an organization’s APIs. webMethods API Gateway securely exposes APIs to consumers, third-party developers, and other partners for use on web, mobile and IoT applications. webMethods Microgateway is an independent offering which is lightweight, agile, and fast. It works with webMethods API Gateway or as a standalone solution to control API access to microservices in a distributed environment. It supports service mesh architectures offering independent and sidecar deployments.

The API Engagement Platform is a new product added to our Software AG API Management Stack. It is a developer outreach platform for API businesses. This is a cloud-native and cloud-only platform for all the API brands to reach the right developers and partners. It helps them with the growth of their API business and revenues.

API engagement platform allows you to build an ecosystem around the APIs you want to offer as products. With this, you can manage APIs as products, proactively promote, market and launch APIs as well as engage the developer community and foster collaboration and run campaigns and evangelize API usage and adoption. API Engagement platform enables an organization to conduct customized beta-programs to test APIs in a beta state.

API providers can now use custom extensions (also known as custom runtime policies) in the API policy stages like Identify & Access, request processing, routing, response processing, and error handling. API gateway provides isolation for multiple teams working in one API Gateway instance. It provides access control based on team-specific privileges. Assets like APIs, Applications, Packages, and Plans can be configured as team-specific, that is, belonging to specific teams. Teams feature can be disabled using API Gateway extended setting. API First Implementation closes the gaps in the support we had and made it easier. With this enhancement, it is possible to send provider-side API specification to the selected Integration Server when an implementation stub is created. Also, user can pull provider-side API specifications from third-party service runtimes. The externalization of configurations in API Gateway can be done and API Gateway configurations can be read from a file or provided via an API.

Previously, users were able to publish the APIs to API Portal directly from Centrasite. To ensure API Gateway being the source of truth, CentraSite now has the capability to publish the APIs to API Portals through the API Gateways where it is deployed. This allows the API Provider to choose which end-points and stages must be exposed in the API Portal. In CentraSite, you can now trigger multiple API Gateways to publish deployed Virtual Services to API Portal. The publishing API Gateways become the API (Virtual Service) owner in API Portal. With this release, CentraSite can synchronize and store the consumer applications that are created in the API Gateways and registered with the APIs deployed from CentraSite. The asset navigator visualization and runtime reporting now provides a landscape of the consumption of APIs by all applications that originated in CentraSite, API Gateway, and API Portal.

Microservices Runtime supports OpenShift. The Software AG GitHub website provides the sample OpenShift scripts. webMethods Microgateway introduces support for a few additional policies in the following stages: Identify and access policies, Identify and authorize application, Hostname address, IP address range, and SSL enhancements. Microgateway now supports configuration of SSL truststore and keystores based on API Gateway configuration. Microgateway now supports configuration of all aliases using environment variables which simplifies the configuration of Microgateway containers in Kubernetes deployment files.

For further details, please refer to the webMethods 10.5 Release Notes at

http://techcommunity.softwareag.com/ecosystem/documentation/webmethods/wmsuites/wmsuite10-5/relnotes/10-5_webMethods_Release_Notes.pdf