April 2022 Summaries

Postman has enhanced its capabilities by allowing users to import external JavaScript libraries into the Postman sandbox, enabling more extensive testing and workflow control. The sandbox already includes popular JavaScript and NodeJS modules like moment, lodash, and querystring, which can be utilized using the require method. For libraries not included in the sandbox, users can import them via a CDN or by pre-loading the library code into a collection variable. The process involves converting library code to a string and evaluating it using the eval function, although caution is advised due to potential security risks. Alternatively, users can store the library code in a variable and access it through an IIFE, avoiding additional requests. The Postman Learning Center provides documentation on available libraries, and a practical example using Day.js demonstrates how to implement this functionality. Users are encouraged to explore Postman's public workspace to experiment with these methods and enhance their testing processes.

Postman audit logs provide a comprehensive record of system and user activities, offering enhanced visibility for team admins to monitor and review how members interact with the Postman API Platform. Recent improvements include a new dashboard that offers better security insights and querying capabilities, with features such as filtering by date, event type, and actor, as well as the ability to export audit events as CSV files for compliance and accountability purposes. These logs are retained for 90 days for Professional plan users and 180 days for Enterprise plan users, with recommendations to use a security incident and event management tool for extended analysis and retention. Access to these audit logs is available to users on the Professional and Enterprise plans, with further information available in the Postman Learning Center and Trust Center.

In a data-driven world, Postman introduces the call logs API, available via the Postman API, to enhance decision-making with enriched data. This API provides detailed request and response data exchanged with mock servers, including request paths, methods, headers, body, response status codes, and timestamps. The call logs API enables users to observe how mock servers are utilized, facilitating debugging, testing, and analysis. Real-life applications include validating content sent to mock servers and analyzing traffic patterns for static APIs hosted on Postman mock servers. Users can further explore these capabilities and Postman's ongoing developments through the Postman Learning Center and Public Roadmap.

Postman API Platform enhances API management by integrating with Jenkins, allowing users to observe Jenkins builds directly within Postman, thus facilitating continuous integration and delivery workflows. This integration provides a centralized view of build information under the Test tab of the API, enabling team members to monitor API builds without direct access to Jenkins, and reducing dependency on alternative communication methods like emails and Slack. Furthermore, Postman introduces improved automation test reporting by integrating Newman, a CLI tool, enabling test results from CI/CD pipelines to be accessed directly within Postman. This consolidation of build and test information streamlines the process of analyzing API performance and updates, offering a cohesive environment for managing and testing APIs efficiently.

Postman highlights the contributions of its female team members as they help shape an API-first world, sharing insights from four women leaders at the company. Shruthi Venkatesh, a Lead Visual Designer, found inspiration in cartoons and her grandfather's artistic influence, emphasizing the importance of seizing opportunities in visual design. Sara Chasse, a Senior Manager in Inside Sales, describes her journey from a childhood interest in sales to a leadership role, advocating for confidence and transparency in the industry. Rose Owens, a Senior Global Recruiter, credits her mother for instilling strong values and finds fulfillment in building teams that contribute to Postman's mission. Shruti Duge, a Growth Marketing Manager, talks about her passion for puzzles and problem-solving, which naturally led her to growth marketing, advising women to explore different marketing roles. The women express appreciation for Postman's cultural values like "Create with Curiosity" and the transparent, collaborative environment that fosters personal and professional growth.

Postman Open Technologies is focused on enhancing the Postman API Platform's capabilities, particularly in API security, by integrating open-source solutions like OWASP ZAP, an open-source web application security scanner. The team aims to create a seamless experience for users to engage with API security through Postman by exploring ways to wrap OWASP ZAP with an API for easy accessibility. Collaboration with other Postman teams and the OWASP community is crucial to their efforts, as they seek to contribute to and learn from the open-source community. This initiative is part of Postman's broader commitment to investing in open-source technologies, fostering interoperability, and enabling users to integrate diverse API solutions into their workflows. The goal is to offer a comprehensive API platform that supports various third-party services and open-source tools to meet the evolving needs of enterprise operations.

Postman, an API platform that began as a simple API client in 2012, has reached a significant milestone with over 20 million users globally, including 500,000 organizations and 98% of the Fortune 500. Celebrated for its comprehensive support of the API lifecycle and recognized in prestigious rankings such as G2’s Best Software Awards and Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, Postman is a leader in promoting an API-first world, where APIs are prioritized and seamlessly integrated into software development. The company is committed to empowering a broader range of users, including non-developers, through features like no-code Postman Flows and public collaboration in the Postman Public API Network, which is free for both publishers and consumers. Postman continues to expand its offerings with increased protocol support, new collaboration features, and community-driven updates, while fostering education and innovation through initiatives like Postman Student Programs and a dedicated API Lab at BITS Pilani. As the need for APIs grows parallel to the evolving tech landscape, Postman aims to enable 100 million connected builders, ensuring its platform remains accessible and adaptable to the changing needs of its diverse user base.

A public workspace linter, integrated with Postman, is a tool designed to help users achieve a consistent and error-free appearance in their workspaces, allowing them to potentially be featured in Postman's vast community. Users can fork a collection from the Developer Experience public workspace and monitor updates when new linting rules are introduced. By inputting their domain as a collection variable, users can run the collection in their own workspace to receive a score based on various checks, such as the completeness of team profiles, workspace descriptions, and documentation of collections and APIs. The scoring process involves multiple GET requests to verify different aspects of the workspace, and users can filter test failures to identify areas for improvement. Advanced concepts in Postman, like branching, looping, dynamic test names, and mimicking a web crawler, further enhance the linting process by providing customizable and detailed insights into the workspace's setup and compliance with style guidelines.

Postman recently launched an API Lab at BITS Pilani as part of its commitment to enhancing API literacy among students and developers globally. Celebrated at the "AsPIring Transformation" event on April 8th, the initiative included a notable fireside chat with Postman Co-founder and BITS Pilani alumnus Abhijit Kane, who shared his journey from a student to a key player in the tech industry. The event, held in Rajasthan, India, was attended by enthusiastic students and faculty, despite high temperatures, and streamed to all BITS campuses. A core component of this partnership is the Postman Classroom Program, which has successfully engaged over 4,000 students across BITS Pilani campuses since its inception in November 2021, with participants earning the Postman Student Expert badge. The program culminated in the first-ever BITS Pilani Postman API Hackathon 1.0, where students created full-stack applications using public APIs, showcasing their new skills. Postman is excited for the API Lab's opening in December 2022 and plans to expand student participation.

Postman's engineering team developed a tool called Matrix to address the challenges posed by a microservice architecture, which can complicate development due to varying system requirements and service ownership across different teams. Matrix, a command-line interface tool, allows developers to integrate their local environments seamlessly with Postman's beta environment, enhancing productivity and reducing change lead time. It comprises a service proxy and a database proxy to handle inter-service communication and access to a common datastore, ensuring consistency between local and beta systems without the need for re-architecting. The service proxy manages outbound HTTP requests and authentication, while the database proxy connects local services to the beta MySQL database via a custom TCP proxy, eliminating the need for developers to handle sensitive credentials. Matrix's modular architecture, implemented using Docker containers, allows for easy updates and integration of new components, with AWS SDK functionality added to simplify credential management for developers. This innovative solution has enabled Postman's team to efficiently manage a complex microservice architecture, fostering a more streamlined and collaborative development process.

A year after the US Supreme Court upheld a ruling in the Google vs. Oracle API copyright case, the decision remains significant for the tech industry as it reaffirmed that while APIs can be copyrighted, they can still be remixed for "fair use." This broader interpretation of "fair use" has been welcomed by industry experts, such as Postman Chief Evangelist Kin Lane, who advocates for APIs to be free from copyright. The ruling is crucial as it applies to widely used web APIs, ensuring that innovation is not stifled by prohibiting the use of established standards. The decision distinguishes between "declaring code," the interface part of the API, which can be re-implemented, and "implementation code," which cannot be copied. This distinction allows for the development of S3-compatible APIs, promoting portability and competition in the cloud storage market, as illustrated by the widespread adoption of Amazon's S3 API as a de facto standard. The ruling facilitates greater flexibility and choice for consumers, enabling easier migration between cloud providers and fostering collaboration by establishing common standards, benefiting the tech industry as a whole.

Allen Helton, a cloud architect at Tyler Technologies, discusses the importance of using the right tools for specific tasks, especially in software applications like DataDog and Postman. He highlights DataDog's strength in application performance monitoring (APM) and synthetic testing, which generates API calls with fake data to verify system functionality, although its feature set is less comprehensive than Postman’s. However, companies heavily invested in DataDog might prefer its synthetic tests for integrated metrics. Helton illustrates how Postman can function as middleware to convert DataDog synthetic tests into Postman Collections for load testing using AWS, showcasing Postman's capability to process, transform, and transfer data between systems through custom JavaScript. He details how to handle request transformations, variable chaining, and assertions, emphasizing the importance of these components in API test conversions. The conversion process is executed in Postman and available in a public workspace, allowing users to replicate DataDog tests in Postman, illustrating Postman's versatility beyond its primary role as an API tool.

The Postman API Platform has expanded its SCIM standard for user provisioning, previously beneficial for teams using Okta, to now include support for Azure AD and OneLogin, enhancing its functionality for enterprise users. This integration simplifies user-lifecycle management by allowing automatic creation and disabling of user accounts, thereby improving security, reducing IT workload, and maintaining compliance with standards like SOC2 and ISO 27001. The update facilitates efficient onboarding and offboarding processes, ensuring that only current users have access and helping to control licensing costs. The SCIM support is available on Postman's Enterprise plan, with setup instructions provided for users of Azure AD and OneLogin, and an official Postman application for Azure is expected to be available soon.

Postman, a popular tool for API development, is celebrated by users and leading API providers for its diverse features that enhance productivity, collaboration, and ease of use. Some highlighted features include Salesforce's public workspaces for community collaboration, Ada Health's enthusiasm for the low-code Flows for building workflows, and Ping Identity's use of environment variables and code generation. MongoDB appreciates the "Run in Postman" button for seamless environment setup, while PayPal and Lacework praise the Postman Collections for discovering and testing new APIs. Typeform values the History feature for revisiting past requests, and Twitter explores mock servers for quicker API deployment. Microsoft's OAuth 2.0 helper simplifies authentication, Google's pull requests facilitate team collaboration, and Stripe utilizes scripts for effective variable management. Postman encourages users to share their favorite features on Twitter for a chance to win exclusive swag, fostering community engagement and feedback.

A technical community manager at Postman created a Slack bot using the Postman API Platform to interact with the Twitch API, aiming to combine interests in content creation and gaming. The bot offers a practical solution for users who want to easily access Twitch data, such as checking out popular games and streamers, through Slack commands. The bot's backend logic is implemented using Postman Collections, webhooks, monitors, and the Slack app, allowing it to not only work with Twitch but also with any other APIs. This setup provides flexibility and functionality by housing the core logic within the Tests section of a Postman request, offering users the opportunity to customize and utilize the bot for various tasks. The project is available on the Published Postman Templates workspace for others to fork and experiment with.

Joanne Snel, a community developer at lemon.markets, highlights the advantages of using trading APIs for developers interested in entering the stock market, emphasizing how these APIs can simplify the trading process by allowing trading directly from an integrated development environment. By utilizing algorithmic trading strategies and automating tasks like screening, trading, and monitoring, developers can significantly reduce the time and effort typically involved in stock trading. Lemon.markets offers two main APIs: a Trading API and a Market Data API, which facilitate easy trade placement and provide historical market data, respectively. They also provide a risk-free environment for testing code through paper trades before executing real trades. With a focus on clear documentation and community engagement, lemon.markets supports developers in creating custom trading solutions and encourages participation through tutorials and an active Slack community.

Postman has introduced new features to enhance collaboration between API producers and consumers by allowing forks and pull requests for environments, similar to collections. This update facilitates the creation of reference environments through forking, which simplifies the process of sending requests by enabling users to work with copies of environments without altering the original. Users can now keep their environments synchronized with the original through pull requests, ensuring they incorporate any updates seamlessly. These features also help prevent accidental changes by allowing work in separate contexts, with the option to merge changes once finalized. Additionally, collaboration is enhanced through pull requests, enabling team members to comment, review, and request changes before merging. Overall, these updates aim to streamline the process of API development and consumption while maintaining the integrity and currency of environments.