APIs can be as simple as 1 endpoint for use by 100s of users or as complex as the AWS APIs with 1000s of endpoints and 100s of thousands of users. Building them can mean spending a couple of hours using a low-code platform or months of work using a multitude of tools. Hosting them can be as simple as using one platform that does everything we need or as complex as setting up and managing ingress control, security, caching, failover, metrics, scaling etc.
What they all have in common are three basic steps to go from nothing to a running API.
Each of these steps has its own set of tools. Here are some I’ve used and popular alternatives.
Design
REST is the most popular API interface and has the best tooling. Our design output for REST services always includes an OpenAPI specification. The specification language can be tricky to get right in JSON (how many curly brackets?) or YAML (how many spaces?) so a good editor saves a lot of time.
Four popular ones are:
I’ve only used Swagger and Postman but both Insomnia and Stoplight look interesting. All of them offer additional functionality like documentation, testing and collaboration so are much more than just specification generators.
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