Even though your database may have fields for the customer’s first name, last name, physical address, credit card number, email address, and other information, the API should only require fields that are necessary at that time.
Using my little example of an API that creates a new customer, your API should probably ask for the bare minimum to do so. The business of writing APIsĪs APIs become more popular, there is an increasing amount of pressure to create them right the first time. Now, in late 2020, the product reports just over a billion API calls. To prove my point, here is a chart from Postman, the company that makes the popular API development platform of the same name:Īs you can see, in early 2015, API developers were making less than half a million API calls. Monetizing APIs is a thriving and growing exponentially. Still, there is another hidden productivity improvement by exposing the service as an API. The reason I use this example is there is already a massive cost saving in using cloud-based services. However, since Azure is an API, I could simply write a script that creates all twenty, and in a matter of minutes, the work is done. For example, if I had a project that required I spin up twenty new virtual machines, I could go to the Azure website and manually add one, answering all the questions and going through all the wizards, then another following the same steps, and then finally two hours later, I am done. Even though Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS have a pretty frontend, they are just a set of exposed APIs. Write once, make money from everyoneįor developers, using APIs is very powerful and dramatically reduces the risk of writing buggy code, and it is a boon to organizations offering their APIs to sell their services. To the person writing the app, they are using whatever language they are comfortable using and calling a “CreateCustomer” API that exists in your corporate network or the cloud.
POSTMAN WEB API CODE
Going back to that example where you write an API to create a customer, that code might check for a valid email address, ensure there are no duplicates in the database, create a new record in that database, and send user-friendly messages back to the calling code. Developers want other developers to use their code and not have to understand the underlying functionality.
POSTMAN WEB API SOFTWARE
If you follow my writings on this topic, APIs continue to grow in popularity as software developers write their code to be shared with others, be it for internal use, free, or as a paid service. APIs are an abstraction layer on top of your code that allows anyone (with access) to call your code in nearly any language. For example, your reusable code in JavaScript may not be as easy to use if you have other code written in C# or Swift. If you ever developed code, you probably wrote pieces of code you can reuse, but it was probably limited to the language you wrote it in. Still, it is becoming more deliberate as organizations realize the code can be exposed as APIs. Writing a single source of code to use everywhere is not new. If there is an error in the signup process, that code always returns the same error message or warning, and any version of the app can display the same information. That signup form might look one way on a browser and completely different on a mobile device, but it is the same exact code that processes the request and writes it to the database. For example, let’s say you have an app that enables a customer to sign up for your website. This type of architecture starts with writing the business logic once and then reusing it wherever it is needed. Instead, developers are thinking in terms of a service-oriented architecture. Gone are the days - well, hopefully - where you have multiple developers writing the same code for the same purpose.
If you are writing code today, you are probably architecting it for high levels of reuse. The popular Postman application programming interfaces development platform has gone back to its web-based roots and introduced Postman for the web, a breakthrough browser interface to make creating, using, and testing APIs easier.
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