Tyk API Designer

I was playing around with Tyk API Designer the other day and I noticed there are 2 ways to edit an API - API Designer or Raw API Definition.

  

API Designer View

Raw API Definition View

I'm not too sure you belong to which camp. I have team members who belong to both camps. The juniors will definitely prefer the API Designer view, while the seniors will go for the Raw API Definition view.

When we go to customers' sites, it's quite obvious. Customers will prefer API Designer view, while my team will most likely configure using the Raw API Definition view, especially when there are a lot of APIs to configure.


That's cool!

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Data-model driven API - Good or Bad?

I came across this blog from Tyk - Your data model is not an API, while I was lying on my bed ready to sleep. 

To me, this is taking a dig at CA Live API Creator. :)

Very insightful article, indeed. This is coming from API consumers' (Customers) perspective, rather than from API developers.

Sometimes, we keep forgetting who our pay-masters are. This is why I keep reminding my team - they have to make our customers happy, not me.


I totally agree with the conclusion:

• Your API consumers want an API that is familiar to them, not to your implementation team 
• Your API consumers want an API that is fast to integrate for them, not for your internal team to implement 
• Your API consumers want an API that is flexible by offering capabilities to get things done, without creating lots of HTTP calls and stitching data together to achieve their desired outcomes 

Finally, it is important to remember that 5 hours saved by your team may cost 10s to 100s of hours by your API consumers. ... A great API design makes it easy for API consumers by hiding internal implementation details, leading to faster integration and happy developers.

It is definitely not easy to design an API.

From our experience with a large insurer in Singapore, we know it could take weeks to design a useful API. Sometimes, we could end up having heated arguments with our customer's application teams, because we do not agree with certain design methodology. But the end result is great! There's nothing wrong with disagreements, as long as it's for the good of the project.


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Tyk 2.5 API Gateway available with OpenID Connect integration

Tyk has just released a new version of their API Gateway - v2.5.

Prior to this release, Tyk already provides OAuth 2.0 and a few other authentication methods. 

With OpenID Connect, the solution looks more complete now as OpenID Connect is picking up.

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API Slug

 I was playing with Tyk since they are offering 50.000 API calls / day FOC. What can you ask for?


While creating a test API, I came across a term "API Slug". What's that?

API IDs are internally unique but hard to remember. These are not useful for users, so you can replace them with a slug.

I find this developer friendly, as opposed to GUID as shown below.

Tyk was built because other open source API Gateways in the market come with dependencies and bloat, attempting to be too many things to too many people. Tyk is focused, simple and does one thing well - protecting your API from unauthorised access.

Another open source product ... let's see how long they will stay being open source.

These days, I make it a habit to fork frequently. You never know when the source will be closed.

When $ comes and put on your table, let's see whether or not you'll stay true to yourself - the original dream of building a whole-class open source product for the open source community.

We are all human beings.



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