Article for WireMock Cloud in DevOps.com
“Soon we’ll be making another run…And love, exciting and new, Come aboard, we’re expecting you…”
– Theme from The Love Boat, American television program, circa 1977
If software is eating the world, then APIs are eating software. Investment in the API economy is increasing. More than 200 million APIs are already out there in the world, and more than 24,000 are publicly available as of 2022, and surely these figures have only skyrocketed since then.
APIs were supposed to ease the journey of creating innovative new features and services within internal and external-facing applications, while making integration smooth sailing.
Unfortunately, leveraging API services within your own application development process often feels less like stepping onto the welcoming deck of The Love Boat, and more like getting marooned on an island for the next season of Survivor.
Barriers to API onboarding
The process of adding some API calls to an application seems quite simple in comparison to the old days of web services and integration buses. A provider publishes an API with a Open API spec, and developers connect to it. Unfortunately, onboarding seldom works out that simply for several reasons:
- Poor documentation. While there may be a Swagger or Postman file sitting there for reference, chances are the documentation isn’t updated as often as the API, nor does it provide helpful instructions or code samples that help developers structure their own calls.
- Inconsistently available sandboxes. All too often, there isn’t a reliable way to try out the API, thereby wasting developer’s time and impacting quality…
Read the whole article on Techstrong’s DevOps.com here: https://devops.com/smoothing-api-onboarding-with-simulation-and-documentation/
©2024 Intellyx B.V. Intellyx is editorially responsible for this document. No AI bots were used to write this content. Image source: Adobe Express AI. At the time of writing, WireMock is an Intellyx customer.
