Revolutionizing Integration: AI-Powered API Documentation and Code Generation in PowerBuilder

Consuming a new REST API often requires hours of reading documentation, mapping variables, and manual coding. This technical demo showcases how to integrate Artificial Intelligence within PowerBuilder to automate this entire process: from parsing web documentation to generating ready-to-use code.

What is this demo about?

The application takes a simple URL containing REST API documentation as input. Through an intelligent AI-driven engine, the tool navigates the page, extracts the endpoints, required parameters, HTTP methods, and response structures.

The final output is not just an API summary, but automatically generated native PowerBuilder code, specifically designed to invoke that API using RESTClient or HTTPClient objects.

Prerequisites for Execution

To ensure privacy and local execution without relying on expensive cloud services, this solution leverages locally-run AI models.

How the Flow Works

• Web Extraction: The application loads the provided URL and extracts plain text from the HTML, removing visual noise.
• AI Analysis (Ollama): The structured text is sent to the local AI model via an HTTP request from PowerBuilder, using a prompt that instructs the AI to act as an expert PowerBuilder developer.
• Code Generation: The AI returns structured JSON or Markdown-formatted text that includes a detailed explanation of the API and functional code (e.g., variable declarations, HTTPClient calls, and JSON response handling).

Conclusion

By combining the robustness of PowerBuilder 2025 R2 with the flexibility of local AI models (Ollama), we can drastically reduce the time required to integrate third-party services. This demo is a clear example of how Artificial Intelligence does not replace the developer, but rather becomes an invaluable assistant that accelerates repetitive tasks.

Luis Avilan