Sharing APIs at Scale for a Great Developer Experience
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This document discusses challenges with developing APIs at an enterprise scale and providing a modern developer experience. It outlines strategies for sharing APIs in a scalable way, including starting with basic functionality and authentication options, leveraging community contributions through open source, and maximizing visibility by publishing documentation on API networks and public workspaces. The presentation emphasizes starting small and iterating based on feedback, as well as covering multiple access paths through desktop, web, workspaces and networks.
Sharing APIs at Scale for a Great Developer Experience
- 1. Sharing APIs at Scale for a Great Developer Experience Presented by Philippe Ozil Developer Advocate, Salesforce @PhilippeOzil
- 2. Forward-Looking Statement This presentation may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. If any such uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions proves incorrect, the results of salesforce.com, inc. could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements we make. All statements other than statements of historical fact could be deemed forward-looking, including any projections of product or service availability, subscriber growth, earnings, revenues, or other financial items and any statements regarding strategies or plans of management for future operations, statements of belief, any statements concerning new, planned, or upgraded services or technology developments and customer contracts or use of our services. The risks and uncertainties referred to above include – but are not limited to – risks associated with developing and delivering new functionality for our service, new products and services, our new business model, our past operating losses, possible fluctuations in our operating results and rate of growth, interruptions or delays in our Web hosting, breach of our security measures, the outcome of any litigation, risks associated with completed and any possible mergers and acquisitions, the immature market in which we operate, our relatively limited operating history, our ability to expand, retain, and motivate our employees and manage our growth, new releases of our service and successful customer deployment, our limited history reselling non-salesforce.com products, and utilization and selling to larger enterprise customers. Further information on potential factors that could affect the financial results of salesforce.com, inc. is included in our annual report on Form 10-K for the most recent fiscal year and in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the most recent fiscal quarter. These documents and others containing important disclosures are available on the SEC Filings section of the Investor Information section of our Web site. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other presentations, press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase our services should make the purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com, inc. assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements. Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995
- 3. Agenda 1 Enterprise-Scale Software Challenges 2 Modern Developer Experience 3 Scalable Strategy for Sharing APIs
- 4. 1 Enterprise-Scale Software Challenges 2 Modern Developer Experience 3 Scalable Strategy for Sharing APIs
- 5. Enterprise-Scale Software Challenges Large app at the heart of an Information System with: • Hundreds of users • Millions of daily transactions • Tens of software integrations From an API consumption perspective: • Multiple authentication methods • Tens of versioned APIs • Customer-specific API signatures
- 6. Customer-Specific API Signatures ACCOUNT Id Name Account Type … Custom Fields … PLANE Id Custom Fields … CUSTOM REST ENDPOINT GET /trip-summary ACCOUNT Id Name Account Type … Custom Fields … CAR Id Custom Fields … CUSTOM REST ENDPOINT POST /generate-report Customer B Customer A Standard Objects Custom Objects Custom REST Endpoints REST Resources
- 7. 1 Enterprise-Scale Software Challenges 2 Modern Developer Experience 3 Scalable Strategy for Sharing APIs
- 8. Modern Developer Experience Expectations THEN Static API documentation NOW • Dynamic and personalized docs • Executable requests • Collaboration and content sharing • Sample code generator • …
- 9. An Example In 2008, our community built a REST explorer solution A revolution in its time Limited w/ regards to current tech: • no persistence • no collaboration • hard to maintain
- 10. Onboarding is Key for Developer Experience Document setup and APIs Devs interested in your APIs may not know about Postman Bonus points for documenting: web UI + desktop app setup
- 11. Postman Web UI - A Lifesaver for Enterprise Access Strict security policies => App whitelisting
- 12. Browser Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) CORS Validation + Access-Control-Allow -Origin header Postman Web UI Postman App Your Server HTTP
- 13. Secure Configuration Should be the Default Avoid storing credentials with OAuth 2.0
- 14. 1 Enterprise-Scale Software Challenges 2 Modern Developer Experience 3 Scalable Strategy for Sharing APIs
- 15. Start Small, Dream Big Start building a collection with: • basic auth options • most frequent operations Ship a Pilot/Beta early and iterate
- 16. You’re Not Alone Building APIs on Postman requires time and resources Leverage community contributions via Open Source We started last year: GitHub repository + Postman backup dump + transformation script Functional but suboptimal
- 17. Leverage Postman’s Public Workspaces User 1 User 2 Fork Pull Pull Request Changes Merge Main Collection (Public Workspace)
- 18. Maximize Visibility Publish on both: API Network Public Workspace
- 19. Next Step: Ship an Open API 3.0 Specification (OAS) Serve customer-specific documentation Provide dedicated OAS schemas • import custom API in Postman or other dev tools • ease third party integrations with declarative options
- 20. Closing Words Start small an iterate with you community’s feedback Onboarding is key Cover multiple paths: • Desktop App + Web UI • Public Workspace + API Network postman.com/salesforce-developers