June 2018 Summaries

The text discusses the author's experience using Postman, an API client, to control Nanoleaf light panels, highlighting the challenges and learning process involved. Initially, the author was not interested in developing a custom app and instead leveraged Postman to experiment with API requests. After spending considerable time navigating forums and documentation, they realized the potential of organizing and documenting the Nanoleaf API as a Postman collection, which could aid other developers facing similar challenges. The author emphasizes the benefits of creating a comprehensive Postman collection, including adding descriptive markdown, example responses, and scripts to enhance usability and facilitate understanding. They also mention future plans to explore additional workflows, such as integrating Postman with other APIs like Stripe to create dynamic lighting effects, underscoring the vast potential of using Postman for innovative purposes.

Newman is an open-source command-line tool developed by Postman that enables users to execute and test API collections directly from the terminal, offering a streamlined approach to API testing. It is particularly useful for QA engineers who wish to occasionally run tests from the command line and DevOps engineers intending to integrate Postman tests with CI/CD processes. Newman allows users to run collections with options ranging from using local JSON files for ad hoc testing to utilizing the latest collection URLs for up-to-date testing in collaborative environments. It also supports integration with CI/CD pipelines, enabling automated testing during the build process in services like Jenkins and Travis CI. By facilitating these various levels of testing automation, Newman saves time and enhances the efficiency of API test management.

The upcoming Postman conference includes a pre-conference workshop where users can enhance their skills and take a quiz to become certified as Postman experts. To streamline the quiz creation process, the Postman team used Airtable's API to organize and format quiz data, which they then transferred to SurveyMonkey using its API. This approach eliminated the need for manual data entry by automating the upload of questions from Airtable to SurveyMonkey. The Postman Collection created for this task functions as an operational script that iterates over the Airtable records to continuously post new questions to the survey. Users can access and utilize this workflow through the "Run in Postman" button, which provides a practical example of automating tasks and managing APIs within the Postman environment.

Postman offers a streamlined process for API builders to share their APIs with a vast community of over 5 million developers through the Postman API Network, the largest collection of public APIs. Developers can easily publish their APIs, whether public or private, by verifying team details, choosing relevant categories, and customizing the appearance before submitting for approval. Once approved, the API becomes available to the global developer community. Users searching for APIs can explore the network via the Postman app, and with a simple click, import the desired API collection to immediately start executing API requests. Postman's API Network not only facilitates the sharing and discovery of APIs but also supports the execution of those APIs directly within the platform, highlighting its role as an "executable description" of an API.