January 2019 Summaries

In 2018, Postman experienced significant growth and achieved numerous milestones, positioning itself as a prominent player in the rapidly expanding API-first development industry. The company was notably flattered when IBM launched a competing API testing and monitoring service, describing it as an alternative to Postman, which underscored Postman's impact in the field. Founded in 2014 as a simple API testing tool, Postman has evolved into a comprehensive platform that supports the entire API lifecycle, catering to the needs of complex, real-world API workflows. The company's success is underscored by a large and active community of 17 million developers and over 200,000 companies. As Postman looks forward to continued growth in 2019, it shares insights on selecting an API-first development platform, drawing from its extensive experience and community feedback.

Postman's introduction of version control in its 6.7 release aims to enhance team collaboration by allowing users to fork and merge collections, similar to branching and merging in traditional version control systems. This feature enables teams to create linked versions of a collection that sync across workspaces, allowing team members to make and test changes independently without affecting the base collection. Users can view differences, verify changes, resolve conflicts, and merge updates back to the original collection, thus improving collaborative workflows. This update, along with the recent addition of comments on collections, streamlines teamwork in Postman by facilitating real-time collaboration across different versions of collections.

Millions of developers rely on cloud platforms like GitHub and GitLab for version control and code backup, which are integral to software development projects. Postman has facilitated synchronization with these platforms by releasing integrations for Postman Pro and Enterprise teams to backup and sync collections on open source GitHub and GitLab repositories. They have expanded this capability to allow teams to also backup and synchronize collections on custom domains with a new enterprise integration. Users can easily navigate the Integrations tab in the Postman dashboard to select and set up their preferred integration with GitHub, GitLab, or custom domains by providing necessary details like personal access tokens and repository information. This integration allows collections to be backed up as single JSON files in specified repositories, enhancing data management and collaboration.

Postman offers an interactive in-app Bootcamp designed to enhance users' skills across every stage of an API's lifecycle, beyond its common use as a REST client. The Bootcamp features a variety of guided lessons tailored to different skill levels, from beginner to expert, and covers topics such as designing and mocking APIs, debugging and manual testing, automated testing, API documentation, monitoring, and team collaboration. The lessons are structured to track user progress and are regularly updated with new content to ensure ongoing learning and mastery. Users can easily access the Bootcamp via the app, select lessons to practice, and follow step-by-step instructions to expand their proficiency in using Postman's comprehensive toolset.

Postman initially supported importing Swagger specifications, but due to the limitations of its collection format, the imports were not comprehensive. With the release of the OpenAPI specification in 2017, the demand grew for more robust support within Postman to import and utilize OpenAPI specifications as collections. Postman has since developed the capability to import OpenAPI specs, preserving key elements such as API structure, schemas, and reusability while allowing for configurable conversion settings. The conversion process involves validation, scaffolding of a trie-type structure for API paths, and the generation of requests and collections based on the OpenAPI schema. The tool has been designed to accommodate various OpenAPI features, ensuring a comprehensive conversion to Postman collections. Future enhancements include multi-file support, handling remote references, and generating multiple collections or environments. The Postman converter has been open-sourced on GitHub to facilitate community contributions and further development in OpenAPI tooling.