This blog was written by Andrew Smithson, an active member of Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe community and technical lead for z?OS Connect Enterprise Edition. This blog originally ran on IBM Developer’s website and can be found here.
One of the key features of Zowe version 1 is the API Mediation Layer which provides a single place where you can find all the APIs that are available on your mainframe and access them from a single well known HTTP endpoint. When you first install Zowe, you get the APIs for working with data sets, Jobs, z/OS MF and the API mediation layer itself. If you want to add your own APIs, such as the administration APIs for a z/OS Connect EE server, you can use Zowe to add an existing API without having to change anything in the server that provides the API.
The configuration file contains the information about the server that is displayed in the API Catalog as well as the URI the server is available on. This file is then placed in the config/local/api-defs directory inside the API mediation layer installation directory. The API can be made live by sending an HTTP POST request to the /discovery/api/v1/staticApi of the discovery service. If you use the httpie client, the following command can be used.
http POST https://<hostname>:<port>/discovery/api/v1/staticApi
To make it easier to get started a sample configuration file is available on GitHub. This file can be updated with your server-specific details and then installed into the API Mediation Layer to add your own z/OS Connect EE APIs.
If you have questions or would like to learn more about Zowe, join the community Slack channel.
