Apigee with On-prem software

[CanaryEng]

I want to create a C# desktop application (on-prem software) that connects to appsheet.  Can I use apigee to create an api and deploy it in my desktop app in order to connect with appsheet?

[dchiesa1 · Accepted solution]

What do you mean by "connects to AppSheet"?   I think of AppSheet as a tool for building apps, and a runtime platform to support the apps.  So I'm not clear as to how a desktop app would "connect to appsheet".  Maybe elaborate a little on what you have in mind?  

To provide some background, Apigee is a full lifecycle API Management platform, and one part of that is a gateway which acts as a cloud-based proxy service. The gateway can act as a go-between, a proxy.  Instead of a client directly invoking the API exposed by a service, the client invokes an endpoint on the Apigee gateway, and the Apigee gateway invokes the API exposed by your service. 

Why introduce another hop?  The reason is to gain some standard control over managing the inbound requests.  Doing things like verifying keys or tokens, routing requests, or rate limiting.  (there are lots more examples).  I'd say if you have a single client and a single service, you probably don't need an API Management solution.  Apigee is mostly interesting to companies who have lots of services, and potentially lots of clients. It's when the API volume gets larger that "API Management" becomes useful. 

AppSheet, for its part, connect to datasources, including APIs exposed by Apigee.  So normally we say AppSheet can connect with APIs managed by Apigee, rather than.... I'm not sure what you were imagining with the desktop app. 

Maybe this bit of background will help as you explore.

One common question I hear from customers is: suppose I have a service on my laptop or desktop, and I want to expose it as an API, to let something else connect to it.  Maybe that's what you're talking about? 

Because AppSheet is a cloud service, it expects the data sources to be available.  And it cannot connect to a thing on your desktop, which is closed down and protected. 

One tool I have used for testing and development purposes is ngrok.  You can use it to expose things on your local machine to the internet. Take care with this tool. It's not provided by Google, not supported or endorse by Google, and I am not recommending it to you.  I am only relating my experience that it worked for me. 

[dchiesa1 · Accepted solution]

What do you mean by "connects to AppSheet"?   I think of AppSheet as a tool for building apps, and a runtime platform to support the apps.  So I'm not clear as to how a desktop app would "connect to appsheet".  Maybe elaborate a little on what you have in mind?  

To provide some background, Apigee is a full lifecycle API Management platform, and one part of that is a gateway which acts as a cloud-based proxy service. The gateway can act as a go-between, a proxy.  Instead of a client directly invoking the API exposed by a service, the client invokes an endpoint on the Apigee gateway, and the Apigee gateway invokes the API exposed by your service. 

Why introduce another hop?  The reason is to gain some standard control over managing the inbound requests.  Doing things like verifying keys or tokens, routing requests, or rate limiting.  (there are lots more examples).  I'd say if you have a single client and a single service, you probably don't need an API Management solution.  Apigee is mostly interesting to companies who have lots of services, and potentially lots of clients. It's when the API volume gets larger that "API Management" becomes useful. 

AppSheet, for its part, connect to datasources, including APIs exposed by Apigee.  So normally we say AppSheet can connect with APIs managed by Apigee, rather than.... I'm not sure what you were imagining with the desktop app. 

Maybe this bit of background will help as you explore.

One common question I hear from customers is: suppose I have a service on my laptop or desktop, and I want to expose it as an API, to let something else connect to it.  Maybe that's what you're talking about? 

Because AppSheet is a cloud service, it expects the data sources to be available.  And it cannot connect to a thing on your desktop, which is closed down and protected. 

One tool I have used for testing and development purposes is ngrok.  You can use it to expose things on your local machine to the internet. Take care with this tool. It's not provided by Google, not supported or endorse by Google, and I am not recommending it to you.  I am only relating my experience that it worked for me. 

[sillan_dt · Accepted solution]

Apigee is a middleware gateway between the client app and the backend server. Having that in your local cannot be possible. It needs to be hosted in cloud (Public/Onpremise).