Postman API: A unique development environment

Curious about Postman? And no, it’s not related to a postal carrier. Instead, it’s a must-have tool for developers who work with APIs regularly. Let’s take a look.

RESTful web services

First, let’s review RESTful web services. Representational state transfer (REST) is an architectural style that specifies constraints, such as the uniform interface. If applied to a web service, these constraints induce desirable properties, such as performance, scalability, and modifiability, that enable services to work better on the web.

The restful API uses HTTP methods to retrieve, access, and edit data records. The most commonly used methods are GET, PUT, PATCH, POST, and DELETE, which get a response, edit a response, add a patch, post a request and delete an existing API, respectively.

About Postman

Now let’s move on to Postman, a powerful HTTP client for testing web services. This app makes it easy to test, develop, and document APIs by allowing users to quickly put together both simple and complex HTTP requests.

Postman REST Client is one of the highest-rated productivity apps in the Chrome Web Store, with more than 348,000 unique users (for both versions) who have shared more than 63,000 collections. Here are just a few of the features that developers love:

• History: Postman saves all the API calls made in the history section. A developer can go back to the history and access a previously run API call, which saves the retyping of the entire API call and other information.
• Collections: Developers can choose to organize the API calls into different collections and folders. Postman allows you to create a collection of requests, which run in the order they appear in the collection.
• Folders: Postman allows developers to create new folders within these collections to better organize their API calls.
• Data Formats: Postman supports working with two data file formats, CSV and JSON.
• Accessibility: Postman allows you to export the collection of requests and share through a unique URL or by generating a JSON file. Example: If you develop a collection with 10 folders, with each folder having
• 10 API requests: you can export these 100 API requests as a JSON file and easily share them with the team. Team members can import the shared JSON file and use all the API requests you originally built.
• Simplified Testing: Postman provides an environment in which you can write and run tests with no additional setup. The tests are JavaScript code snippets that can test API responses, ensuring that they have met the conditions as specified in the test code. A list of commonly used test snippets appears on the right side of the text editor so that users can add tests to API requests with just one click. You can view test results in the Tests tab of the response viewer as well as in the collection runner. This feature allows developers to test API requests and complex scenarios without having to write a lot of additional code.

To read more about the flow, and monitoring, view our full article here: https://www.logic2020.com/insight/tactical/postman-api-development-environment?utm_source=social&utm_medium=Medium&utm_campaign=Postman_API