On this project, we collaborated with a Brno based company IDEA StatiCa s.r.o. that develops their own engineering software for structural design. The aim of this project was to create a REST API  for their user and license management frontend application.

Development process

Thanks to good communication, flexibility and experience with different types of agile development of everyone involved, we were able to use a lightweight agile process for this fixed-price project (which is usually quite challenging).

On our daily standups, we were coordinating our work with one of IDEA’s own developers (who developed an authorization service that needed to be integrated into our API), as well as with another company (who were responsible for building IDEA’s frontend app, requiring us to share our API documentation in advance). Weekly demos and sprint reviews ensured regular feedback on our progress among all parties. Additionally, these meetings helped us set realistic expectations for the following week, as well as communicate the remaining budget to the client.

Technical details

IDEA StatiCa had been using a 3rd party cloud service to manage their users, roles, and licenses. This 3rd party service provides a WCF/SOAP API of dubious quality. This is why they wished to create a dedicated service (a REST API) between their frontend application and the 3rd party API, which would enable them to more easily migrate to a different provider in the future.

Our task was to build their new REST API, using the .NET framework and Amazon Web Services (to fit into their tech stack). Its functionality was to include user and license management (using the 3rd party WCF/SOAP service), as well as audit logging (using AWS CloudWatch).  We designed their REST API and shared automatically generated documentation in Swagger format. We also set up their serverless cloud infrastructure on AWS. In addition to the API runtime (AWS Lambda and API Gateway), this also included resource templates (AWS CloudFormation), secrets management (AWS Secrets Manager), and monitoring (AWS CloudWatch for audit logging and diagnostics, AWS X-Ray for performance/tracing). After implementing the API in C# using the ASP.NET Core framework and AWS SDK, we ensured proper test coverage with unit tests and integration tests. We also cooperated with their developer to integrate his OAuth service for API authentication (including role-based access).

Summary?

The REST API that we created with IDEA StatiCa is fully cloud-based and allows them to develop their user interface efficiently, and also opens up the possibility of future migration to a different SaaS provider. As a whole, this project is a great example of when a customer knows what they want and is looking for a quality implementation of their vision. Thank you, IDEA StatiCa, for this pleasant experience!