Envase Connect Gateway API
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The |gw| is a service that allows external applications to access and manipulate data on the different |en| |tms|. The |gw| provides a single point of access to all the information in |en| |tms| products exposing a common interface known as |coreapi|_.

The common interface is documented in the |coreapispec|_ which is implemented by the different |en| |tms| products. Using the |gw|, applications and services can gain access to the information on those products.

Overview
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|en| provides multiple |tms| solutions to its customers. These solutions have been around for a long time and customers love them. There are, however, many challenges for applications and services to integrate with these products.

One of the challenges is that most of these applications are *legacy* desktop products. These applications are either hosted by |en| in some sort of virtual machine through our SaaS providers, or they are self-hosted by our customers on-premise or in their virtual clouds. This makes the integration with other services and applications very difficult.

Another challenge is that the different |en| |tms| applications have been around for a long time. They have evolve in many different ways. They might provide similar functionality and solve some of the same problems, but they do it in many different ways. Historically, applications and services that wanted to integrate with these different |tms| needed to know many of the internal implementation details of each of them. This fact just makes any kind of integration more difficult.

The |gw| solves this problem by providing a common, JSON based interface that applications and services can use to integrate with any of the |en| |tms| products without the need of knowing the internal implementation details.

How the |gw| solves this problem is documented and explained in the |gw-architecture| section of this documentation. Basically, the |gw| is just a central point of integration where applications and services will send their requests. The API will evaulate who is sending the request, and forward the request to the appropriate |tms|. The response from the |tms| is then returned to the application that initiated the request.

Each of the |tms| applications insure this mechanism works by implementing the common interface known as |coreapi|_. Applications and services that integrate with |en| |tms| products only have to worry about integrating a single version of this interface.

You can find more information in the following sections of this guide:


.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 1

   gateway/gw-architecture
   gateway/gw-dev-guide