A little bit ago, a friend and I attended a RedHat event here in Montreal. Part way through one of the talks, an app was mentioned and demonstrated that had the “Oh! That's pretty close to what I was thinking”. In this instance, it was Apicurio. They let you design your API using a GUI builder which produces an OpenAPI spec file. I love this idea. We should all be using OpenAPI.
Sometimes we just need “factory” services. I'm not talking about the typical Java-style factories you're used to. I'm talking about simple CRUD services for fairly simple data models that feed hundreds, if not thousands of “downstream” processes. Using JSON, one example of an overly simplified data model could look like:
{ "source": { "vendor": "Some Institution", "filename": "file123.xlsx", "correlation_id": "b2eefb6e-779a-4c08-b0a5-006c401ea2fa" }, "some_record_name": "Abc 123", "amount": 1022.41, "different_amount": 99.2, "applicable_date": 1557965341334661013, "created": 1557965202009530561, "created_by": "some_user", "updated": 1557965202009530561, "updated_by": "some_user" } A lot of different teams at a company probably need this data, but not all the teams have shared services nor using services half the time.