How to Consume and Expose APIs with Low-Code
Today, companies rely on data to make informed decisions more than ever. However, tapping into the information they need it’s not easy. Modern organizations run on multiple systems spread across multiple departments, making data disseminated throughout different platforms and siloed instead of aggregated in a single monolithic system as happened in the past.

Although this distributed paradigm brings many benefits, as I stated in this session, it also brings a set of new integration and data management challenges.
It’s this context that sets the stage for the era of API integrations. But building — and managing — multiple systems and respective APIs can be very challenging.
In a time when the world is constantly changing, organizations need to be agile enough to respond to the market’s demands. From an integration perspective, that means that development teams need to embrace a full lifecycle approach where they continually manage the integration, update it, revise it, and go through another iteration to make changes or add to it. Which is tremendously complex with traditional development but not so much with a low-code platform.
Now that we’re done with the history lesson roll up your sleeves: let’s see how you can consume and expose APIs with low-code. In this tutorial, we’ll be using OutSystems, so if you want to join me, you can get our free version here.
Consuming and Exposing APIs with Low-Code
OutSystems provides out-of-the-box capabilities that simplify consuming and exposing functionality as SOAP web services and REST APIs without any hand-coding.
Once OutSystems has generated the methods and data structures to integrate with the external system, you can use them visually in the application logic of Service Studio (OutSystems development environment). There is no difference between invoking an OutSystems method, a SOAP web service, or a REST API from a developer's perspective.
Here’s what OutSystems does when consuming a SOAP and REST API:
SOAP Web Service | REST API |
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In the video below, we show you step-by-step how to integrate a REST API into your application.
Now, let’s see how to expose it.

Want to give it a try? Signup for OutSystems free edition to get started.
And if you want to learn more about OutSystems integrations, here are additional resources for further reading:
- [Documentation] OutSystems Extensibility and Integration capabilities
- [Technical White Paper] Integrating OutSystems with Your Ecosystem
- [Trending Tech Talk] Accelerate Enterprise-Grade Integration with Low-Code
- [In-DeptTech Talk] Application Integration for Modern Organizations
- [In-DeptTech Talk] How to Build Secure and Scalable Integrations