What GUI tool can I use for building applications that interact with multiple APIs?

Question

My company uses a lot of different web services on daily bases. I find that I repeat same steps over and over again on daily bases.

For example, when I start a new project, I perform the following actions:

1. Create a new client & project in Liquid Planner.
2. Create a new client Freshbooks
3. Create a project in Github or Codebasehq
4. Developers to Codebasehq or Github who are going to be working on this project
5. Create tasks in Ticketing system on Codebasehq and tasks in Liquid Planner

This is just when starting new projects. When I have to track tasks, it gets even trickier because I have to monitor tasks in 2 different systems.

So my question is, is there a tool that I can use to create a web service that will automate some of these interactions? Ideally, it would be something that would allow me to graphically work with the web service API and produce an executable that I can run on a server.

I don't want to build it from scratch. I know, I can do it with Python or RoR, but I don't want to get that low level.

I would like to add my sources and pass data around from one service to another. What could I use? Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Progress DataXtend Semantic Integrator lets you build WebServices through an Eclipse based GUI.

It is a commercial product, and I happen to work for the company that makes it. In some respects I think it might be overkill for you, as it's really an enterprise-level data mapping tool for mapping disparate data sources (web services, databases, xml files, COBOL) to a common model, as opposed to a simple web services builder, and it doesn't really support your github bits, anymore than normal Eclipse plugins would.

That said, I do believe there are Mantis plugins for github to do task tracking, and I know there's a git plugin for Eclipse that works really well (jgit).

Answer 2

Couldn't you simply use Selenium to execute some of this tasks for you? Basically as long as you can do something from the browser, Selenium will also be able to do. Selenium comes with a language called "selenese", so you can even use it to programmatically create an "API" with your tasks.

I know this is a different approach to what you're originally looking for, but I've been using selenium for a number of tasks, and found it's even good to execute ANT tasks or unit tests.

Hope this helps you