We are seeing many governmental institutions adopt the DreamFactory REST API platform for a variety of innovative purposes. The customer might be a foreign country, a state, a province, or a city. In many cases they are working with a software development partner who has recommended the DreamFactory platform. One very common use case is when a governmental institution needs to provide access to public information. DreamFactory makes it very easy to safely expose a database or services as a REST API for integration or application development. Hopefully this blog will outline how cities, states, and countries around the world are using DreamFactory. Here are some recent customer examples.
Government Provides Land Use Information
A government in Southeast Asia needed to provide public information about land usage to citizens and developers building applications for real estate and other purposes. They stored their land usage records in a PostGIS database. PostGIS is an open source software program that adds support for geographic objects to Postgres. They also needed to expose a variety of SOAP and REST services that their developers would need. Some additional information was being stored in MongoDB.
They used the open source version of DreamFactory to build a quick prototype, and by the time we started talking to them they were already in production. One challenge was that they needed to support a massive number of transactions, and the services needed to be continuously available. We helped them architect their backend servers for high availability and failover. This provided a backup system for uninterrupted operation.
During extensive testing, one of the developers managed to bring the site down with too many queries. They switched to the DreamFactory Gold product and turned on rate limiting. This helped harden the system from overuse or attack. They also turned on the API reporting features so that they could track developer adoption of the land use information system. For authentication they used the native DreamFactory user management services. Developers can sign up for the system and login for a session ID and access.
Electrical Grid Information In Texas
A city in Texas needed to provide public information about the electrical grid to partners, developers, and utilities. Previously, city workers had to track down the information manually and send emails or faxes when people were interested in some aspect of the electrical grid. They considered opening up their enterprise services bus (ESB) for this purpose, but this solution was too complex and there were security concerns. A much better solution was to expose this information in a lightweight REST API, and that is where DreamFactory entered the picture.
Most of the electrical grid information was being stored on Oracle servers. They also had some SOAP APIs that needed to be converted to REST and exposed to developers. For authentication they used the native DreamFactory user management services. Partners and developers can sign up for the system and login for a session ID and access to information about the electrical grid. The entire platform was finished in just a month or two.
In Conclusion
We are really excited to see governments around the world turning to DreamFactory when they need to expose public information for developers and partners. In some cases massive scalability is important, and in other cases the ability to provide an easy to use service platform for citizens is what matters. We are seeing other governmental institutions using DreamFactory strictly for internal projects. If you work for a state, local, or federal institution and need a REST API platform please drop us a line and let’s see what we can do together.
