Let's Build an API together - Part 13

Last Update: 05.01.2018. By Jens in API Series | APIs | Newsletter

This episode is another one of “it didn’t work out as planned.” I originally wanted to use Abao as a tool for testing my API implementation against the RAML description. Unfortunately, Abao only works with RAMl 0.8 and not with RAML 1.0 which I was using. The request ticket for RAML 1.0 support was opened in 2015 and is still not done.

So, I moved on to the next tool in the List which happens to be Postman. Bad luck again as Postman also does not support RAML 1.0. It didn’t look any better for the other tools. Seems, the support for testing tools working with RAMl 1.0 is pretty bad.

Spec changes are bad as most of the tool support will lag behind several years.

It’s too bad as the testing feature was a major factor for me going the route at all. However, it is not an that important to me so that I will use an outdated spec just because of the tool.

At least not for our series.

It might be different for a customers project if this auto-testing feature will save us days and helps to detect issues early on. Nonetheless, I would test it BEFORE I ever start to use it for the customer project.

The customer should not suffer because the shiny new object of a dev didn’t work out. If he knows, agrees and is aware of the risks, it’s another thing.

Don’t test out new tech for the first time on a customer project.