Middlewest is pleased to announce our newest rating engine: a web services API (Application Programming Interface). Our API allows you to incorporate our freight rating functionality directly into whatever applications you are running, regardless of the software platform, coding language, or operating system. This way you won’t need to download and install a separate application in order to have rating functionality.

Aside from the convenience lies probably the most useful reason to integrate an API into your software. Your software team can utilize the rate data our API sends back in any way you need to: put it in a spreadsheet, add it to a database, or even incorporate it into a TMS (Transportation Management System).

This API web service is located on a server in Middlewest’s office. So, essentially your software application will access the API via an http XML request. The API then processes the request and sends back an http post XML response. It does this using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). You can see a detailed description of the XML documents here.

And through the API you have access to Middlewest’s vast library of tariffs, including our own nationwide and international MARS tariffs as well as a large number of private individual carrier, shipper and 3PL tariffs. And should you require rates from a tariff not in our library we can usually obtain the data and add the tariff to our library.