Wednesday 24 June 2020

Postman API Builder Intro

Overview: Tools for building and mocking API's.  Swagger has good tooling and my original preferred choice.  APIM - Great tooling, part of Azure and easy to replace mocks as you go along with the live implementation.  Postman is offering a great set of functionality to rival Swagger and APIM.  This post looks at Postman's new functionality around building API's.

Postman API Builder:
Not only a test rig, it now offers the ability to build API's and mock:
  • Mock - so you can test supports key and OAuth authentication
  • Assert Tests - You can specify asserts in postman
  • Test suite - generate collections/Collection Runner - Allows a set of related tests to run sequentially.
]
  • Document the API
  • Monitor
  • Version control for changes e.g. GITHub
  • API Versions supported
  • Note: Free plan has all of this, limited on the number of API's but all the features are on the free plan.  The main notation formats are support including:  Open API specification (OAS) & GraphQL
Summary:
I like Swagger tooling, I have done a few projects find APIM fantastic for building API's quickly.  Postman historically was merely my test rig but looking at the functionality, Postman API Builder is a great option for designing and building API's.  Postman is a good tool for building into CI/CD pipelines to validate API's.

Few more assert examples:

Postman offers a service to monitor API's using your postman collections, these can be triggered using Curl so can build into DevOps, Power Automated scheduled flows,....
sentry.io looks good as an alternative option

0 comments:

Post a Comment