API Integrator: A UI Design and Code Automation Application Supporting API-First Design

Microservice Architecture (MSA) is a standard for solving the technical challenges of distributed software systems. Design methodologies assist in making decisions about the functionality encapsulated by each microservice in a system. Despite the documentation supporting microservice design, challenges remain in defining microservice boundaries and concise APIs exposing business capacities of the modern distributed, data-intensive, microservice-based system. API-First Design is an emerging methodology for enterprise system design. Its primary principle suggests that software design focus on well-defined APIs as its foundation. In its infancy, research, documentation, and tools that assist in adopting an API-First Design approach are minimal. The project discussed in this paper provides the research community with a set of practitioner-defined features and a prototype for an application intended to help promote the adoption of API-First Design via an API-Driven UI design and code generation application.