API Development
Discover Why Blackbird Offers the Best of Both Worlds for Dummy APIs and Mocking
Imagine you're building a shopping app. It needs to display a list of products, but the backend team hasn’t finished the API for fetching product data yet. Without the API, your app can’t show anything, and your work is stuck.
Here’s where a dummy API for testing comes in. A dummy API returns a fixed list of products, no matter what you request—shoes, books, or anything else.
December 10, 2024 | 15 min read
API Development
APIs provide communication and data exchange "interface" between various software systems. Due to their extensive usage in both public and internal applications, even minor modifications to an API can have a significant effect. Without versioning, modifications to the structure, behavior, or format of the API may unintentionally cause unexpected behaviors for users who depend on earlier versions or break client applications. Any program depending on the original format, would probably malfunction or generate errors.
What is API versioning?
API versioning is a method for managing changes to an API over time. As APIs grow to meet new business demands, embrace new technologies, or address bug fixes, they must be carefully updated to ensure that existing clients can continue to work while new features and improvements are enabled.
December 6, 2024 | 21 min read
API Development
Let’s start with two facts. First, APIs are a central — and increasingly important — part of business infrastructure across industries in terms of both managing costs and maximizing profits. Second, developing production-ready APIs is complicated and stressful, especially when increasing financial expectations and security considerations are thrown into the mix.
The results are predictable: stressed-out developers, security vulnerabilities, and budget overruns. Teams that find a better way to build APIs could reap major rewards. So what does that take?
One step that could transform your API development process is likely simpler than you think. It all starts with better API mocking.
December 4, 2024 | 13 min read
API Development
Modern applications are complex. Complex frontends must interact with complex backends. These interactions are handled through APIs that the backends expose. One of the most common forms of these APIs are restful APIs that leverage common HTTP verbs sent to meaningful URIs.
There are multiple moving parts here and it's not uncommon to have multiple teams working on these parts. There might be one team building the frontend that consumes these APIs and another that builds the APIs. Or it could be one team with multiple people working on the frontend and backend in parallel. In either case, you have multiple people involved in the development of the overall application.
How do you keep them aligned through the development? One of the best ways is by exercising strong design first principles with the creation of specifications that define the contract of the APIs that are going to be consumed. OpenAPI provides a well adopted language for doing so. It standardizes how you represent APIs.
December 3, 2024 | 6 min read
API Development
API development might seem daunting for students venturing into the tech world, but with the right tools, it’s an incredibly rewarding skill to master.
Enter Blackbird, the API development platform designed to simplify the process. Whether you're working on a class project, a hackathon, or a personal side hustle, Blackbird equips you with everything you need to create, test, and refine APIs—all in one place.
Blackbird has generated a lot of engagement from the education sector for higher-ed professionals and students alike (no, it’s not going to just do your coding assignments for you!). This interest spurred us to think about some of the use cases Blackbird would excel at in an education environment. I covered a few of the main ones below, but really as it relates to Blackbird, there are endless possibilities for students including:
December 2, 2024 | 7 min read
API Development
API creation is essential for building scalable and efficient applications. Coupled with API mocking, developers can accelerate API development cycles and test applications without waiting for backend services. In this guide, I will provide you with a comprehensive overview of creating APIs from scratch and setting up API mocking to simulate API endpoints early in the development process.
What is API CreationAPI creation is the process of designing, building, and deploying APIs that allow software applications to communicate and share data seamlessly. This process involves defining endpoints, setting request and response formats, and implementing security measures to ensure reliable data exchange. Effective API creation enables developers to build scalable, flexible applications by providing standardized methods for applications to interact, whether within a single system or across multiple platforms.
API Creation and Its Key Benefits
November 29, 2024 | 9 min read
