Last week we merged our plugin into Backstage (Pull Request) to generate SDKs for internal services. For those that love to follow and discuss technology, we also published a blog post where Dylan reviewed 1,000s of GraphQL vs. REST perspectives. We also made a lot of improvements to our Python, TypeScript, and PHP SDK generators.

Backstage Plugin​

SDKs help onboard external developers but we know that the same problem exists inside organizations when integrating APIs from different teams owning different services. Backstage is a developer portal for centralizing your infrastructure and enabling product teams to quickly ship high-quality code. So we created a Backstage plugin to auto-generate SDKs for internal API services. If you are interested in generating SDKs for your internal APIs please reach out to us and we would love to talk. Check out our official plugin here!

Blog Post: I Reviewed 1,000s of GraphQL vs. REST Perspectives​

Ask any developer: do you prefer GraphQL or REST? This often leads to opinionated conversations, sometimes even devolving into vulgar opinions rather than objective facts. To delve into the GraphQL vs. REST debate, I scoured platforms where developers frequently discuss such matters: YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, and Hacker News. I parsed 1,000s of discussions and synthesized my findings in this blog post, striving to present only thought-provoking perspectives. Read more here!

Ask any developer: do you prefer GraphQL or REST? This often leads to opinionated conversations, sometimes even devolving into vulgar opinions rather than objective facts.

To delve into the GraphQL vs. REST debate, I scoured platforms where developers frequently discuss such matters: YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, and Hacker News. I parsed 1,000s of discussions and synthesized my findings in this article, striving to present only thought-provoking perspectives.

Next, I transcribed these discussions onto a whiteboard, organizing them into "Pro GraphQL," "Pro REST," or "Neutral" categories, and then clustering them into distinct perspectives. Each section in this post showcases a perspective while referencing pertinent discussions. To conclude, I highlight blog posts from GitHub and Shopify that serve as informative case studies in this ongoing debate.

Industry: Fintech

Results​

At Konfig, we are rapidly making progress towards building the easiest way to onboard developers to your API. To keep our followers up-to-date, we are starting this newsletter that will feature 2-3 of our biggest product updates and little fixes.

STATISTICS.md​

Now konfig generate will generate a file named STATISTICS.md that contains a count for Lines of Code in each SDK for your API. Here is an example that we generated. This file is generated in the same directory as your konfig.yaml file. In the future, we would also like to add more data such as weekly downloads.

Interactive Tutorial​

Our interactive tutorial is now live! Learn how to generate SDKs with a guided interface. This is a great way to get started with Konfig if you would like to generate SDKs yourself.

Improved TypeScript SDK Error​

Instead of just throwing the error from the underlying request library, axios, we now generate a file called error.ts that contains a custom Error class. The name of the class is based off the client name in your konfig.yaml file. The new custom error message has a cleaner interface and better inline documentation. In a Next.js API environment, the logged errors now exclude a lot of the garbage that was not helpful when debugging.

Imagine you are tasked to write 417,823 lines of code in 6 different languages. What if there was a way to slash that development effort significantly with just a fraction of the effort? Introducing code generation, where a few high-level instructions can do the work for you. In this blog post, we'll dive into the superpower of code generation, uncovering its presence from early programming to modern-day AI assistants.

If you are on a desktop, you can run through the tutorial in a browser by clicking here. We also filmed a video in case you would rather sit back and watch.

What exactly is an OpenAPI? In this article, we'll cover the problem that OpenAPI solves and explore its importance in modern software architecture.

As software systems become more interconnected, OpenAPI has emerged as a vital tool for promoting collaboration and enabling seamless integration between different applications. Today large API-first companies like Stripe and Plaid use OpenAPI so it's no surprise that OpenAPI is finding widespread adoption.

Originally started as a side project, Postman has become one of the best tools for collaboratively building APIs with over 1.29 billion requests created in the past year.

As organizations' investments of time and resources into APIs increase, API-first organizations must leverage testing tools like Postman. Adopting an API tool is an effective way to save thousands of engineering hours.

SDKs makes the integration of REST APIs easier by packaging boilerplate code for developers.

Why do developers need help integrating APIs?​

Let's take a look at the numbers.

Plaid has a REST API with 215 operations, 1346 schemas, and 215 parameters.

SnapTrade has a REST API with 91 operations, 125 schemas, and 183 parameters.

Twilio has a REST API with 199 operations, 152 schemas, and 874 parameters.

The complexity of these APIs can be daunting for developers who are under a time pressure to integrate an API and frustrating for API companies because onboarding is time consuming. Developers are required to parse tons of documentation and code while API companies must provide continuous support for a successful partnership. To make matters worse, developers can be using a programming language that nobody at the API company knows. To alleviate the pain, best-in-class API companies publish SDKs to accelerate the integration process.