Hi,
I am currently investigating in how far Business Automation Workflow (BAW) and Workflow Process Service (WfPS) support REST based communication with external clients and I hope you can help me understand a few aspects.
Just to be clear: This is
not about the built-in, generic BAW REST API but about the possibility to create custom REST APIs that expose a set of services from process applications running in BAW/WfPS to external consumers.
External REST services for
outbound communication have existed in BAW for a while by now. In recent versions of BAW, 'Exposed Automation Services' were added to also enable
inbound communication via REST. Nice!
Unfortunately, these exposed automation services currently support POST calls only - but none of the other verbs, like GET or PUT. This looks rather unidirectional to me. So, here are my questions:
- What is the reason for POST being used exclusively?
- Is this a permanent limitation or will there be support for other verbs in the future?
- How is a client supposed to fetch resources from a process if only POST can be used?
The answers should also be relevant for WfPS. As far as I understand, WfPS has the potential to facilitate microservice implementations as it enables developers to modularize and isolate business processes. This, however, can only work well if the individual modules properly interface with each other.
How is this interfacing supposed to work? Aren't RESTful services the preferred choice?
Thanks for your clarification!
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Gregor
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