Light Portal

Light-portal is a set of services for consumer and provider runtime management and marketplace to bridge the gap between consumers and providers. When you build microservices on a large scale on top of light-4j and related frameworks, you need a portal service to manage the entire life-cycle of your services and to provide a marketplace for bridging API consumers and API providers. We have explored the open-source projects on github.com and could not find any existing product that meets our requirement, so we decided to build it on top of the light-4j framework.

In the long run, we will be deploying the infrastructure services to the cloud along with light-portal to serve small and medium-sized organizations at https://lightapi.net. All services in the portal support multi-tenancy, so all users will be grouped based on the host selected during the user registration on the portal.

We will also set up a dev/test environment in parallel with https://lightapi.net called https://dev.lightapi.net for developers and testers. All-new UI components and services will be deployed here to test and then move to the production site. This site is also free for all users to access and test the functionality of their services during the development.

For some organizations that want to have their domain name and customized portal UI, the light-router who serves the portal UI supports virtual host. In fact, https://lightapi.net is just one of the virtual hosts along with https://demo.taiji.io, https://faucet.taiji.io, and https://taiji.io on the same light-router instance. You can check the IP address for the above sites. With a virtual host, it would be very easy to have your portal site like https://portal.example.com with your company’s customized UI style.

The open-sourced portal-view gives all developers a chance to custom or style the portal UI freely. We encourage partners to white-label the light-portal services with customized UI with their brand and sell the subscriptions to their customers.

We will also package the services and UI as an enterprise edition for large organizations to install on their private or public cloud. We will charge a yearly subscription fee to allow users to use the software and provide commercial support for customers.

The portal services can be found at light-portal, and it is only open-sourced to paid customers. However, the portal’s UI is open-sourced to the public at portal-view.

As we are aiming light-portal as a cloud service, it needs to scale for the Internet volume. Please visit technology stack for the non-functional requirement and frameworks for both back-end services and front-end UI.

The following are major components for light-portal:

Error Management

Light-4j has a module named status that is used to manage the error message returned from the API. It loads the status object from the status.yml file in the status module along with the app-status.yml defined by each service built on top of light-4j frameworks. Here is an example of status defined in the status.yml ERR10000: statusCode: 401 code: ERR10000 message: INVALID_AUTH_TOKEN description: Incorrect signature or malformed token in authorization header Read More »

Host Management

Private Message

Payment Management

Order Management

OAuth Admin

As you know, we have eight microservices in the light-oauth2, and they are all responsible for different things. Services like code, token and key will be accessed from the microservices to obtain authorization code, JWT token and public key certificate. Others like client, service and refresh-token are used for OAuth administrators to register clients, services and manipulate refresh tokens. Until now, most users are using curl or postman to access these services through the REST API, which is very difficult to use. Read More »

API Certification

This service is part of light-portal, and it is used to check if the production deployment meets the security requirements and corporation standards. For every instance of light-4j service, we have an endpoint /server/info injected. The output contains a lot of information about the service runtime environment, security configuration and configurations for all active components and middleware handlers. The endpoint is security protected, and only the light-controller and light-portal can access the endpoint. Read More »

User Management

This service is part of light-portal, and it is used for managing users for the light platform. Most functionalities of the light-portal need the user to be logged in. Scope User Management only manages user registrations, email confirmations, profile updates, user deletes and password changes. The user login and logout will be managed by the light-spa-4j and light-oauth2 on light-portal for single-page applications. When you scale to multiple router instances, the session management will be implemented with light-session-4j. Read More »