November 2015 Summaries

Companies around the world are increasingly adopting Microservices Architectures to enhance digital transformation, as demonstrated by industry leaders like Amazon, Netflix, and eBay. This architectural approach enables developers to innovate rapidly and improve agility and resilience by moving away from monolithic structures. Tools like Hivepod and Postman are facilitating this shift by streamlining the process of designing, building, testing, and deploying microservices. Hivepod allows developers to quickly generate and deploy MEAN stack-based microservices by specifying relational data models, while Postman offers robust API development and testing capabilities with over 2 million users, enabling developers to send requests, analyze responses, and organize tests efficiently. The integration between Hivepod and Postman accelerates the delivery workflow by generating complete Postman collections for API testing and exploration, making microservices development more accessible and efficient.

Postman has introduced Postman Echo, a new service designed to help users understand and analyze the HTTP requests they send. While Postman previously relied on HTTPBin and its own fork, PostmanBin, Postman Echo was built from scratch to better support the wide variety of HTTP requests that can be issued via Postman. It features more than 20 endpoints, supporting various authentication methods like Basic Auth, OAuth 1.0, Digest Auth, and OAuth 2.0. Each HTTP call in Postman Echo is thoroughly documented, providing detailed explanations of request types and offering insights into the underlying technology of HTTP requests. The service's documentation is accessible at echo.getpostman.com, and users can easily add the Postman Echo collection to their local Postman setup with a single click, enabling immediate experimentation with the available endpoints. Postman plans to release further updates and information about this functionality on their blog.

The RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML) 1.0 has introduced features to address the complexities of designing large APIs, and Postman has enhanced its functionality by supporting RAML folder imports, overcoming previous limitations with Chrome's File API. With Postman version 3.1 and above, users can detect and import all RAML API definitions within a folder, a feature demonstrated by importing the GitHub API RAML definitions. This enhancement allows Postman to convert RAML definitions into Postman Collections and supports the import of Postman Collections and Environments, streamlining the process of managing multiple API collections and their environments.