TransFICC Raised $17 Million, WSO2 Choreo, AWS Step Functions
This is issue 2022.13 of the API Changelog, a weekly mix of API news, commentary, and opinion. In this issue, you’ll get to know the most relevant API-related information from the week of March 28, 2022. Subscribe now, so you never miss an issue of the API Changelog.
Funding and M&A
TransFICC, an e-trading platform, raised $17M in a Venture round. AlbionVC led the investment, with participation from Citi, HSBC, and ING Ventures, among others.
Announcements
LiquidityBook, a trading solutions provider, announced a significant expansion of its API capabilities. The “newly enhanced, JSON-centric, RESTful APIs can accommodate any system bandwidth and enable the integration of myriad functions across the front and middle offices.”
WSO2 announced the general availability of its Choreo Digital Platform as a Service. “Choreo empowers organizations to rapidly deliver new digital experiences by creating and deploying services, integrations, and APIs in hours or days, versus the weeks or months that most projects take today.”
Calendly, a scheduling platform, announced the availability of a new developer portal. “The portal gives developers access to tutorials, sample code, developer guides, and API references to easily integrate Calendly’s scheduling functionality into their software and improve productivity.”
API-first
Peter Schroeder wrote “How Far API-First Companies Have Come.” This report shares a list of API-first companies and how they have progressed since 2015. According to the author, on average, the mentioned companies have “grown 100x+ in valuation.”
Ronald Chen wrote “3 bad REST endpoint designs.” In this article, Ronald presents three alternatives to designing a user deletion REST API endpoint. The goal of the article is to get to a good Design by iterating on a few options.
Rajat Thakur wrote “Modern REST API design principles and rules.” This piece explores the concepts and challenges of REST API Design. According to the author, “APIs must be fault-tolerant in order for duplicate requests to yield the same results.”
Management
Mikhail Lepeshkin wrote “Create and deploy API documentation to Kubernetes.” Mikhail starts this article by explaining why API documentation is important and how you can create it from a machine-readable definition. The author then guides you on how to make the API documentation available on Kubernetes.
Tangram Flex published “Under the Hood: An Inside Look at Testing Auto-Generated APIs.” This article explains how API testing works, from a technical perspective. The authors go through different types of tests such as static code analysis, property-based tests, and the more common unit tests.
Lebin Cheng wrote “Effectively Manage and Secure APIs.” In this tutorial, Lebin shares a playbook for managing and securing APIs.
Practice
Christien Kelly wrote “Organizing your backend API.” In this piece, Christien shares what options you can consider while organizing the code that powers your API. According to the author, “architecture is as important as understanding other concepts,” like API lifecycle and authorization.
Allen Helton wrote “How to Build Lightning Fast APIs With AWS Step Functions.” This article goes through a bit of the history of AWS Lambda and how you can create a REST API endpoint that uses an express workflow. There are tradeoffs to consider, such as speed. However, the author believes that “latency will continue to decrease, and the feature set will continue to increase.”
Adesoji Susan wrote “Python’s urllib.request for HTTP Requests.” In this piece, Adesoji explains what the urllib module is and how you can use it to access API resources. According to the author, “there are more powerful libraries,” however urllib is a good introduction to consuming APIs using Python.
Withney Guilherme wrote “Building a professional API with NodeJS, Typescript, ExpressJS, MongoDB, Jest + Deploy to Heroku.” This is part 4 of a series of articles focused on helping you build a Node.js API from scratch. In this article, “you’ll learn the CRUD paradigm, implement it in Node.js and work with Express Routes and Requests.”
Mukul Attavania wrote “One Solution guide to APIs: SOAP, REST, GraphQL, OpenAPI and gRPC.” In this piece, the author shares an approach to deciding which technologies to use on your API project. The author compares SOAP, REST, GraphQL, OpenAPI, and gRPC, sharing comprehensive information about each approach. According to Mukul, the way to decide is “to put together a team of open-minded collaborators from across the company to take a thoughtful, analytic approach when considering an API format.”
