2023's State of the API Report
GraphQL finally takes SOAPs spot, and its official API first is the way to go. The new state of the API report from Postman gives us some real insights in this issue.
Postman dropped their 2023 State of the API Report. 75% of respondents agree that API-first companies are more productive and create better software. REST remains the top architecture but has lost some ground. Meanwhile, GraphQL finally took SOAP's spot.
Some interesting stats in this report; however, while it was a survey, some of the data comes from Postman usage. Not everyone is on Postman, so worth bearing in mind. The full report is worth reading; you can find it on the Postman site.
Monthly API Round-Up
Our monthly round-up of articles, news and updates from the web.
Akita Joined Postman
Postman has acquired Akita, a tool for drop-in discovery and monitoring of your API endpoints. A real success story for an API-focused product. If you're curious about the founder Jean Yang's journey, raising funds and the tech stack, she sat down for an interview with The Pragmatic Engineer.
Web Integrity API
A proposal from Google to learn about a browser's user, ensuring their not a robot or the browser has been tampered with. While you can argue there are positives to this proposal, it comes with many downsides, and that's not including that it's coming from Google. Another sign the death of the open web may be upon us. As we get forced into even more wall gardens, at least we can laugh about the closed issues in Github.
Web Framework for the Edges
So many deployment options can now run across edge networks however finding a JS framework that supports all runtimes and platforms can be tricky. However, the JavaScript ecosystem is coming full circle and implementing the same standards. Hono takes advantage of this allowing you to build web APIs and deploy across multiple JS runtimes: Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute@Edge, Deno, Bun, Vercel, Lagon, AWS Lambda, and Node.js.
The Case for 'Developer Experience'
Jean Yang makes it into two of my links in this issue. Jean dives into the developer experience, covering the history and why it is essential. As developers of APIs, developer experience is at the heart of our work. Development is so much more than writing code. Give this article a read.
Event-Driven Architecture
Not everything is a REST API; sometimes, you need to build something completely different. Matt Boyle walks us through event-driven architecture and why you might need to create one.
From Our Community
Articles written and shared in our free Slack community.
API Design Influences Everything
Sid Maestre shared a podcast episode where he talked to Richard Moot from Square. A great listen covering API governance at Block and how they approach things like versioning and deprecation. Thanks for sharing, Sid.
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