Using Postman for API consumption

Being a caveman

So what is wrong with curl?  Nothing.  But Postman (at getpostman.com) is simply one of the best tools I have used while developing code that consumes APIs.  This is another case where I was using caveman tech (curl) to do a job so elegantly managed by a service that makes a desktop app that runs on Linux, MacOS, and Windows (and syncs across them).

Sometimes you just need an API

My coding and racing adventures led me to develop and win an award for the marrspoints.com application.  The app consumes two different APIs: race-monitor.com and motorsportreg.com.  I used curl to do the testing dirty work for these as one of them did not publish their response formats that I needed for my JSON parser.

I have been playing with a stock/equities “demo app” for my Cassandra cluster.  The app required me to replace the old Yahoo quotes feed.  I had to do testing on the new feed I chose, and I was still doing it with curl.

Even a stealth API…

Currently, I am now working on a stealth start-up idea with an even more stealth cohort of mine in the financial space.  The data company we have tentatively selected (and their API documentation) pointed me to Postman.  It is awesome.  I have deeply tested the financial access, accounts, instruments, etc.  This was accomplished on my own accounts in only a couple hours of work and research.  Postman is script-able, has variable replacement, etc.  Oh, and the best part, a single developer license is FREE.  My favorite price.

To think Sam Morris at Digital River talked about Postman dozens of times. It never occurred to me to go look at it.  That cost me a lot of wasted time. Especially since I know Sam is “the man”.  Thank you Sam – the second time I heard of it, I knew to go get a copy and learn it quickly.

Ted Cahall

Author: Ted Cahall

Ted Cahall is an executive, engineer, entrepreneur as well as amateur race car driver. He combined his skills as an engineer and passion for racing by developing the marrspoints.com points tracking website for the Washington DC region of the SCCA.