Introducing API development tools
While developing APIs, it is important to make sure the endpoint is working with every possible input and that we manually test the APIs before handing them over to the client team for integration. Though it is always favorable to write unit and integration tests for every piece of code/API you create, we might not be able to write them. Due to this, API development tools come in handy to support you through this journey.
Postman is one of the most popular tools in the developer community that helps developers build APIs at every stage of the development process. Though it is common to use Postman for testing APIs, it has far more use cases than just testing the APIs, as follows:
- Creating mock servers with the API contract to help the client team work independently while the backend APIs are being developed
- Creating documentation and OpenAPI specs for the team to work with endpoints
- Creating a collection of APIs that can group APIs as per the use case
- Creating tests that can run periodically on remote servers to make sure the contract of the APIs has not changed
The tutorial series on Postman’s website is quite intuitive: https://learning.postman.com/docs/getting-started/introduction/. Please go through the tutorial if you are not familiar with it as we shall use Postman throughout this book to test our endpoints. You can use other tools for the same purpose, such as hoppscotch (https://hoppscotch.io/) and testmace (https://testmace.com/).
Learning new tools is a skill set that is important for the growth of any developer since these tools ease our development journey. Throughout this book, we shall introduce and learn about new tools that will help with just that.
