trustgraph/docs/apis/README.md

TrustGraph APIs overview

If you want to interact with TrustGraph through APIs, there are 3 forms of API which may be of interest to you:

Pulsar APIs

Apache Pulsar is a pub/sub system used to deliver messages between TrustGraph components. Using Pulsar, you can communicate with TrustGraph components.

Pros:

• Provides complete access to all TrustGraph functionality
• Simple integration with metrics and observability Cons:
• Integration is non-trivial, requires a special-purpose Pulsar client library
• The Pulsar interfaces are likely something that you would not want to expose outside of the processing cluster in a production or well-secured deployment

REST APIs

A component, api-gateway, provides a bridge between Pulsar internals and the REST API which allows many services to be invoked using REST APIs.

Pros:

• Uses standard REST approach can be easily integrated into many kinds of technology
• Can be easily protected with authentication and TLS for production-grade or secure deployments Cons:
• For a complex application, a long series of REST invocations has latency and performance overheads - HTTP has limits on the number of concurrent service invocations
• Lower coverage of functionality - service interfaces need to be added to api-gateway to permit REST invocation

Websocket API

The api-gateway component also provides access to services through a websocket API.

Pros:

• Usable through a standard websocket library
• Can be easily protected with authentication and TLS for production-grade or secure deployments
• Supports concurrent service invocations Cons:
• Websocket service invocation is a little more complex to develop than using a basic REST API, particular if you want to cover all of the error scenarios well