Creating a Java API to Access Watson Work Services
A few weeks ago, IBM announced Watson Workspace, the final name for Project Toscana, and its API Watson Work Services. The product itself has similarities to Slack or Microsoft Teams, but this post is not about discussing a comparison of the products. It's about the API backing it.
Watson Work Services is a REST API that uses GraphQL, a method of querying and posting via REST that focuses on configurability. Whereas traditional REST services have fixed endpoints that take fixed parameters and return fixed data objects, GraphQL is a sort of "API-as-a-service". You call an endpoint, pass a JSON object determining what elements of which data you want to return, include any dynamic variable values. The queries are passed to an engine at a REST service endpoint which parses the JSON passed, replaces any variables with the dynamically passed values, and returns just what the application or user asks for. This may include data from what, in a traditional REST API application, would be from different REST endpoints. For example, to get members and messages from a space, you might need to make a REST call to get the space ID, then another REST call to get its members, and a third to get the messages.