Hub

[kinlane]

I would like to craft a story about a hub for test compliance kits.

[lbroudoux]

hub.microcks.io is a new community website that is not yet officially launched. Its goal is to collect and curate API Mocks & Test suites for being used within any Microcks instance.

hub.microcks.io allows developers, standardisation organisations, regulatory committees and product managers to easily distribute their API specifications, mocks and test suites. Microcks users can directly access Hub.Microcks.io to retrieve these API artifacts and make them actionable through a number of use-cases:

• Discover and play with API,
• Create a local sandbox for their developers,
• Evaluate the impacts of an API version upgrade,
• Assess their implementation using an API Test and Certification Kit,
• Animate and grow an API consumers community, …

Microcks leverages standard specifications and formats like OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, Postman Collection, GRPC/Protobuf files… Adding them to the Hub is just a matter of adding some metadata using manifest.

We’re proposing 2 concepts :

• The API Package is the top-level concept that allows you to wrap together a set of related APIs. The package can be related to an open source project, a commercial product or an industrial standard and it must belongs to a specific business category,
• The API Versions are simply the versioned APIs that are members of the package. The Hub will keep history of different versions you’ll release through your package. An API Version links to your API artifacts through the contracts property as illustrated in below schema.

As an example, you can have a look at the OpenBanking.org.uk APIs.

Because an API Version can wrap many different artifacts like AsyncAPI, OpenAPI specs and Postman Collection, they can be easily used by Microcks users to ensure their implementation is compliant wit the standard. That’s what we called the « API Test and Certification use-case. Let’s imagine this story :

As a Bank, I want to provide a set of APIs that respect the OpenBanking.org.uk standards. Of course, I can get the swagger definitions of the standard from the developer portal but how can I assess that my development team has fully understood and implemented the standard?

Is it fairly easy with hub.microcks.io :

• Setup a private internal Microcks instance,
• From this instance, connect to the hub and retrieve the set of APIs I’m interested in,
• From Microcks, launch tests on my own implementation to heck conformance. As the hub wraps different kind of artifacts, I can validate :
  • contract syntactic rules checking OpenAPI schema conformance,
  • business behavior rules using Postman Collection test scripts

The community-mocks repository holds initial contributions and examples as well as the validation materials (JSON schemas) for the metadata contributors have to provide.