Managing application programming interface requests

We propose a rule-based system, whereby API requests issued by an application program are screened by policy rules before being acted on by an API, where the policy rules are sensitive to the runtime environment. A policy manager is arranged to screen API requests transmitted by the application program against a set of rules to decide whether a particular API request should be allowed to proceed to the API unchanged or be trapped. Trapping an API request causes an API response to be generated according to the rule that trapped the API request, and then transmission of the generated API response to the application program. This allows dynamic modification of the application program's behavior by the customer in order to respond to changes in the server runtime environment without having to modify the application program by configuring one or more policy rules to influence API request handling.