Chapter 1. Overview of the API Designer

Red Hat Fuse on OpenShift provides API Designer, a web-based API editor, that you can use to design REST APIs that comply with the OpenAPI specification (versions 3 or 2), a vendor-neutral and portable open description format for API services. API Designer is a “light” version of the Apicurio Studio open source project (https://www.apicur.io/). This means that your API Designer sessions are stateless and you must save your API definition as a JSON file at the end of each session.

You can also use API Designer to generate a preliminary Fuse project based on a REST API definition. In your Fuse development environment, you can then complete the project’s Camel routes and build the project. Finally, you can deploy the resulting REST service on Fuse on OpenShift.

Here is an overview of how you can use API Designer to incorporate REST APIs in your Fuse on OpenShift application solution:

  1. Add API Designer as a service to your OpenShift project.
  2. In API Designer:

    • Create an API definition with API Designer. Save the REST API definition as a JSON file to your local file system. You can save your API definition at any point during your editing session, even if the API definition is not complete.
    • Upload an API definition to API Designer.
    • Generate a Fuse Camel project based on the current REST API definition. API Designer provides a downloadable zip file that contains a complete Maven project.
  3. In your Fuse development environment, complete the skeleton implementation provided by the generated Fuse project.
  4. Build and deploy the Fuse application to OpenShift.
  5. (Optional) Integrate the Fuse application with Red Hat 3scale API Management, using the 3scale service discovery capability to find and configure your Fuse application.