Item: IBM API Connect
Rating: 5
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our business application we are building APIs that help our customers create web applications and dashboards.

The APIs have a lot of business logic into it, we create a sort of "middleware" between multiple companies that are working together. We are in charge of managing performances and access, as well as developing new APIs.

Pros and Cons

Security. I would say creating and applying scopes to each operation is intuitive and clear.
Managing multiple path at the same time. Creating new path and operation is straightforward.
The analytics tab is good to see what APIs have trouble with errors

The documentation is really frustrating. It does not cover enough functionalities with examples.
A whole 100 pages long documentation should be available on gateway scripts.
Each component is viewed individually, there is so much need for documentation on common pattern designs and how to implement them ourselves.
When you are modifying an API and using the test tab, it can takes a lot of time for the actual change to be updated.
Please put a simple check to make us know if the latest change was taken in account. It sometimes can take up to 30 seconds, which is WAY to long when you are putting 4 hours straight of developing and making change every 20 seconds.
500 internal errors are killing me. Please find a way to handle javascript errors
Too few policies available. Nothing to handle arrays of jsons.
More videos. Youtube is full of "why API Connect is useful" but nothing is on actual API Creation. Is it lame, too much goes into marketing and nothing is left for actual users.
IBM have way too many tools and name. When we are using google to search for one of your product we fall on the wrong documentation most of the time.
Why writing "IBM API Connect" leads me to 3 different products ??

Return on Investment

Very very slow development due to lack of clear guidelines on how to use the tool properly. I think the tool is good, but without clear instruction we just want to leave.
Not having a native database connector make us use an other API as a proxy to query on a mongoDB database. It cause a lot of trouble and I see it as a lack of functionality. The tool is incomplete.
While it pleases people who do not write a lot of code it clearly need more policies available to seduce UI lovers. So it gave us a lot of frustration.

Usability

For everything that is simple to do like creating operations, new paths and so on it is really good. But theses task are so simple that writing code would be the same. It feels like the devs at IBM never used they own UI in my opinion. If you open it you see menus that can't be reduced in size, only 30% of the screen is really used and it's a pain to see our policies sometime. Some colleges use CSS injectors to make space to see things. That's crazy.