The success of digital transformation in organizations developing complex products and systems hinges on rapidly connecting diverse data streams and models across thousands of enterprise tools/services into digital threads. These digital threads form the “information” nervous system of an organization, making it possible to propagate, query, analyze, and present information to decision-makers.
Syndeia 3.5 will ship with a game-changing solution to this challenge. The new RESTful Integration capability in Syndeia 3.5 will enable users to integrate any enterprise tool/service that provides a RESTful API into the Syndeia platform in a few minutes. Users can connect to any COTS, GOTS, OSS, or home-grown enterprise tool/service with a RESTful API via the Syndeia Dashboard with no code. Once integrated, users can connect the artifacts in RESTful repositories with artifacts in other integrated repositories to build digital threads.
Most modern tools/services provide a RESTful API for integrating and exchanging information with each other. A RESTful API for a tool/service provides endpoints to GET (fetch), POST (create), PUT (update), or DELETE (delete) artifacts managed by that tool/service. The data sent to and returned from the RESTful API for a tool/service can be in different formats, JSON being the most common. Syndeia Cloud itself provides a RESTful API. Syndeia’s dedicated integrations to most enterprise tools/services, such as Jira, GitHub, and Jama use their RESTful APIs.
The RESTful Integration capability can be used via the Syndeia Web Dashboard and local clients in the following way.
Figure 1 - RESTful repository with collections and requests. The response for each request is shown under that request.
1. Add any enterprise tool/service with RESTful API as a RESTful repository in Syndeia. This is a new repository type available on the LHS of the Repository panel.
2. Create requests to any GET/POST endpoint in the RESTful API to fetch data. A simple and easy-to-use form is available to create a new request by providing its name, method (GET/POST), URL, and other optional information, such as query parameters, custom headers, or request body. Users can test requests before creating them.
Figure 2 - Create new requests and collections from the Syndeia Dashboards using a simple and easy-to-use form.
3. Execute requests and fetch data from the RESTful repository. View the raw JSON response as a tree view in the Syndeia dashboards, as shown in Figure 1. This JSON data is available in Syndeia as an artifact (RESTful artifact).
4. Create inter-model relations from/to RESTful artifacts to/from artifacts in other repositories, either available via dedicated integrations, such as Jira, Jama, GitHub, and Windchill, or via the new RESTful integration.
5. Organize and build libraries of requests as Collections. Collections are logical groupings of requests. Create collections based on various criteria, such as:
- types of requests, e.g. all requests related to rockets vs. ground stations
- frequency of requests, e.g. requests to execute daily, weekly, or monthly
- product functions, e.g. design requests, launch requests, in-orbit requests, and so on
6. We envision two types of users for the RESTful Integration capability. Syndeia 3.5 provides permissions for each.
- Request authors are curators of Requests and Collections. They are aware of RESTful APIs of enterprise tools/services to integrate. They can create Requests and Collections using Syndeia dashboards or API.
- Request users execute Requests, view responses from enterprise tools/services, and create inter-model relations to artifacts in other tools/services to build digital threads.
7. Syndeia is an API-first platform. The RESTful Integration service is available with Syndeia Cloud RESTful API. The Syndeia Web Dashboard and Syndeia local clients both use the same Syndeia Cloud API that end-users will be able to use. Syndeia Cloud RESTful API is available as an OpenAPI specification with Swagger doc. Jupyter notebooks demonstrating the RESTful Integration capability will be available with the Syndeia 3.5 release. The notebooks will also demonstrate the ability to generate reports containing tables, charts, plots, and other visualizations from artifacts fetched from RESTful repositories.
8. Syndeia 3.5 documentation will include examples and templates for adding new RESTful integrations to new commonly-used tools/services. The live Syndeia Training Program will include demonstration sessions for using the RESTful Integration capability.
An open, scalable, and secure digital thread is at the heart of our vision for Syndeia. With the RESTful Integration capability, the number and variety of tools/services that can participate in digital threads for your products or systems are limitless. We envision that this new capability will lead to significant expansion of the variety of data streams and models across the system lifecycle that can be connected seamlessly in digital threads.
Glossary
- COTS = Commercial-off-the-shelf
- GOTS = Government-off-the-shelf
- JSON = JavaScript Object Notation
- MBE = Model-based Engineering
- MBSE = Model-based Systems Engineering
- OSS = Open Source Software
New in Syndeia 3.5 blog series:
To learn more about new capabilities coming in Syndeia 3.5, refer to other posts in this blog series.
- Part 1 - Syndeia – Vitech GENESYS Integration
- Part 2 - Syndeia – SmartBear Collaborator Integration
- Part 3 - Syndeia – ESTECO Volta Integration
- Part 4 - Syndeia - RESTful Integration (This post)
- Part 5 - Single Sign On with SAML2
About Syndeia
If you are new to Syndeia and want to learn more, we recommend the following: