The core Postman product: working with APIs
Postman is an “API platform” – admittedly not a very useful or specific description – with many different products that can help you design, build, test, and iterate on your APIs. You can think of it as a development environment for APIs.
The main thing they’re known for is their API client – a nice tool for developers to work with APIs, debug why they’re not working, and save their common requests.
It’s an API-First world
Pretty much everything in software is just a bunch of APIs – so understanding Postman means understanding what those APIs are, what they do, and most importantly, how developers work with them.
If you haven’t yet, check out the Technically posts on API basics and working with APIs 101. This section will touch on APIs briefly, but to go in depth you’ll want to read these.
Let’s start with a brief history of APIs. The oldest widely adopted API protocol is called SOAP, and it was released all the way back in 1998. Today, the most common protocol is REST, released in 2000.
These are just protocols (blueprints), though; what really matters is what developers did with them. Amazon and eBay would create some of the first partner APIs in the early 2000s. In the mid-2000s Twitter and Facebook would release public APIs. But the release of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the launch of the iPhone are the two catalysts that would really help bring about an API-first world. AWS showed us that web APIs could be used to deploy infrastructure – not just interact with a database – which changed the way companies did business. The iPhone kicked off the “everything is mobile” phase, allowing products like Twilio and Google Maps to emerge with APIs that would become essential for mobile development.
Every piece of software you use is a collection of internal, public, and partner APIs with varying degrees of “faces” or frontends. If you’ve ever used Zapier to create a new record in your CRM every time a new email appears in your inbox, you’ve used a pretty frontend to interact with those APIs.
So how do developers actually use these APIs? There are a few ways:
cURL is a popular command line tool for making API requests from your terminal- Client libraries written in specific programming languages like Ruby or Javascript
- UIs provided by the API provider (more rare)
With more non-developers at companies needing to interact with various APIs and existing tools not being the best when it comes to collaboration, there was a need arising for a dedicated toolkit for testing and working with APIs.
In 2012 Abhinav Asthana decided to release his API testing side project to the Chrome Web Store. It quickly racked up half a million users (!) and he promptly turned it from a side project into a real company. And that company is Postman!
