Abstract: The present disclosure relates to techniques for discovering and exposing middleware applications as service endpoints through a universal connector in a middleware-agnostic fashion that does not require additional coding. In one embodiment, a back-end middleware system identifies a set of middleware applications that operate on an input/output (I/O) data area. Next, the back-end middleware system generates a set of discovery artifacts describing the middleware applications and the I/O data area. A discovery client sends a discovery request to a the back-end middleware system, which sends structured information from the discovery artifacts in response. Based on the structured information, the discovery client creates a REST model for the set of middleware applications, mapper artifacts that map REST operations to the middleware applications, and transformer artifacts that indicate how to convert data between Javascript-object-notation (JSON) format and format that is compatible with the I/O data area.