Solution Overview

Solution Background

With the continuous advancements of IT, enterprises have more and more service systems. Data needs to flow smoothly between these systems to improve operational efficiency. Enterprises are paying more and more attention to secure exchange of data between legacy and new service systems within an enterprise and even between the service systems of different enterprises.

• As an enterprise expands across regions, its service systems are deployed in its branches in different regions. Service systems need to be interconnected between the headquarters and the branches. If different service systems directly access the database of each other, the operation mode is too complex and database information leakage may occur.
• In their daily operation, enterprises produce and accumulate huge volumes of data assets. However, in most enterprises, data assets are confined only to internal use, resulting in low reuse of the assets. If the database is directly accessed by partners or third parties, it is difficult to ensure access security.

Solution

API Connect (APIC) is a component of ROMA Connect for API integration. APIC can encapsulate existing backend services, data sources, and user-defined functions into standard RESTful APIs and expose them to external systems. This simplifies data sharing or service provisioning and reduces the cost of interconnection between enterprises.

This section describes how to use the APIC of ROMA Connect to quickly open up a database as RESTful APIs for data access between different service systems. In addition, multiple security authentication modes can be selected to implement secure access across networks and regions.

• Data providers use RESTful APIs to open data in their databases to external systems. Through simple operations, they can quickly open data or services with low costs and risks to provide value-added services.
• Data users do not need to customize connection clients. To obtain data from various databases, they only need a client that can send simple RESTful requests.

The APIC of ROMA Connect directly reads data from the database, encapsulates the data into a RESTful API, and exposes the API to other service systems inside or outside the enterprise. Other service systems can call this API to obtain data from the database.

ROMA Connect APIC encapsulates database data into RESTful APIs in either of the following ways:

• Data API: Reads data from a database by SQL scripts. The operation is simple and convenient, but the flexibility is low.
• Function API: Reads data from a database by JavaScript. ROMA Connect provides a Java class DataSourceClient for reading database data. After reading data, you can use JavaScript to orchestrate and adapt data. The operation is complex, but the flexibility is higher.