Have you ever worked with an APIthat provided insufficient documentation ornone at all?It is really painful!If you’re trying to write an interface against the API,it is like coding in the dark:you just throw things at the APIand hope for a proper response.
In an ideal scenario,you could update the documentation,either by submitting a pull requestor sending an email,but those factors are often out of our control.Even if you have a well-documented API,you still need to try requests against the APIto make sure you understand how it works.I’ve used a number of tools for thisincluding curl,small scriptsand GUI editors.
Paw, new to the Setapp family, is a one-stop shop, a robust, Mac-native HTTP client that lets developers build software with APIs. Now, this is pro software for pro developers: If you don't know acronyms like API, PHP, REST, SSL, and JSON, for example, this probably isn't for you. But let's briefly explain why Paw so helpful. 20 Best Hacking Tools For Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X in 2021. So, in this article, we are going to share a list of best hacking tools for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Most of the tools listed in the article were available for free. We have written the article for educational purposes; please don’t use these tools for evil purposes.
Recently,I started using Paw to work with APIsand found that it has been really helpful to our process.I’ll talk about a few of the benefitsbut first let me quickly explain what Paw does.
What is Paw?
Paw is a Mac application ($29)that provides an interfacefor sending web requests to an API.It is primarily designed around REST APIsand provides a very easy way to manipulate the arguments,headers,and others part of your request.
Paw saves your queriesand allows you to nameand group them.The queries are storedin an application-specific file formatthat can easily be sharedwith other Paw users.All this is wrapped upin a very intuitive and helpful GUI.
Living Documentation
On a previous project,I was tasked with building an EmberJS applicationagainst an API that I did not control,without access to the source,and the API was not properly documented.My only hope at finding out what options were availablewas to bug people who had worked with the APIand continue to toss queries at it.
I used Paw to make my life easier:it helped me to have executable documentationI could easily update and keep on hand.I could play with queries,make sure they were properly formed,check the return values,and save them in my collectionin case I needed to change something in the future.The process of quickly adding an extra argument in Pawand then verifying the resultwas very helpfuland sped up a lot of my testing.
Paw also supports pluginswhich allow you to export generated codefor specific languagesor export API documentation in different formats,such as Markdown.
Onboarding New Developers
Paw turned out to be a really nice wayto hand off my knowledgeto the next developer on the project.Though most of the main API endpointswere already used in the application,having a Paw file with examples of all the optionsmade it very easy for the new developerto see what was available.
Having the Paw file availablealso made it very easyto troubleshoot problemsin our application.We could easily throw the query into Pawand find out if the problem was with our app,our understanding of the APIor the API itself.By leaving that knowledge in the Paw file,we’ve saved future developersfrom having to go through a similar process.
Downsides
Paw is Mac only,which is not ideal.We have teammateswho are not Mac usersand they will not get the same benefitsfrom the legwork we’ve done through Paw.There are a few cross platform options out there,including Chrome extensions,but so far,I haven’t found any that match the level of polish that Paw provides.
Paw may not be right for all teamsbut if your team is primarily on OS X,I highly recommend trying it out.If Paw is not an option,a small scriptthat has saved commandsfor all the endpointsmay be a great compromise.The goal is to storeas little knowledge about the app in our heads as possibleand put more of it in the documentationor codebase.
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