The Postman team has launched a new platform to assist with API creation. Public workspaces are a public platform for exchanging information on the further development of APIs. In addition to those who provide the interfaces, the developers who use them also take part in the discussion.

The concept has expanded the Postman workspaces that have been offered for some time, which are used for communication in the team during development, but remain closed rooms. Postman users have long wanted to open up their virtual workspaces.

Together in the API dungeon The team compares the procedure with massively multiplayer games, in which a group of players complete quests together or defeat virtual opponents. In the same way, a huge community (massive community) should come together in public workspaces with the ultimate quest goal of improving the APIs.

By default, the public workspaces have a comment function via the users give their opinion on certain parts of the APIs. A “watch” function reports updates and related changes to interested parties. In addition, the methods and tools for creating and testing the APIs such as schemes, mocks, tests and documentation can be shared with the community in the virtual workspaces. These flexible elements should make static documentation superfluous.

Changes from outside are not allowed by default, since all API consumers initially only have read access and require the approval of the team responsible for creating the API for changes . For the two most expensive packages from Postman – Business and Enterprise – the operators are given the role of “Community Manager”, with which they can control their public presence. They control in detail which workspaces they share publicly and how in the API network.

The postman and his dog food True to the English motto “Eat your own dogfood”, Postman has created a public workspace for the in-house APIs. There you will find information about the lifecycle and the use of the programming interfaces and tools that access the Postman APIs.

Postman shares his own APIs in a public workspace.

Further details on the launch of the Public Workspaces, which are currently marked as beta, can be found in Postman’s press release. A more detailed description of the public workspaces for Postman’s own APIs provides a blog post.

(rme)