Changelog

Jerod talked with Paul Fremantle, the CTO and Co-Founder of WSO2, about their new programming language, Ballerina — a cloud-native language which aims to make it easier to write microservices that integrate APIs. They talked about the creation of the language and how they were inspired by so many technologies. cloud native features like built-in container support, serverless-friendly, observability, and how it works with, or without, a service mesh — just to name a few.

Twitter is at it again making controversial changes restricting how the developer community can use their APIs to develop 3rd party Twitter clients. Sarah Perez reports on TechCrunch: Twitter is breaking users’ favorite third-party Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Twitterific by shutting off APIs these apps relied on. Worse still, is that Twitter isn’t taking full responsibility for its decisions. In a company email it shared today, Twitter cited “technical and business constraints” that it can no longer ignore as being the reason behind the APIs’ shutdown. This change sparked the #BreakingMyTwitter hashtag

Get instant GraphQL APIs on any PostgreSQL database. We are super thrilled to announce the launch of the Hasura GraphQL Engine, an open source product that gives you instant GraphQL APIs on Postgres. You can try it out here — it will take exactly 30 seconds to deploy to Heroku’s free tier (yes — we counted 😀). Check out the open source repo on GitHub.

A new minimal, extensible, fast and productive framework for building HTTP APIs with Python. Featuring request validation, dependency injection, functional middleware, and more.

John Resig and team at Khan Academy implemented a generic GraphQL platform and their development practices changed overnight. The benefits they saw were so substantial that he and Loren Sands-Ramshaw decided to write a book about it. …we’re using GraphQL in more and more places: we are transitioning older pages over to use GraphQL and have a mandate in place that all new pages need to use GraphQL. The benefits that we’ve reaped have been so substantial, even though it’s still early days. We’re writing new products faster, we’re able to rapidly iterate on designs, and we’re keeping our server implementation slim. Wow, “REST APIs now feel quite antiquated…” I look at how well it’s worked for us and read stories about how GraphQL has changed other organizations, and I can only think that GraphQL is going to dramatically change how we all build APIs going forward. REST APIs now feel quite antiquated by comparison. Beta chapters of The GraphQL Guide are available now.

Flare listens to changes on HTTP endpoints and notify subscripted clients about the changes. It help reduce the pressure on APIs by avoiding the clients to do pooling requests to search for new/changed content and the need of the APIs to develop workers to notify the clients about the. Pitched as useful for microservice architectures, but could find lots of uses outside of that context too.

This is an excellent post with some immediately useful takeaways (and some open source, to boot). Chris starts it with a compelling description of JSON API’s value proposition: how to use JSON API as an “anti-bikeshedding weapon” Building Restful APIs requires hundreds of tiny decisions, which is like having a bike shed on every corner. Outsource the little stuff!

Johannes Schickling (Founder of Graphcool) joined the show to talk about GraphQL — an application layer query language from Facebook. We talked about what it is, where it makes sense to use it, its role in serverless architectures, getting docs for free via Schemas and Types, and the community that’s rallying around this new way to think about APIs.

Ahmad Nassri from Mashape joined the show to talk about Kong, an open-source management layer for APIs and Microservices.