Flowlet.app

I've spent the past 15 years building web applications for development agencies. As the tech lead, I've integrated with plenty of APIs, from GraphQL and JSON APIs to XML feed imports, SOAP, and XML-RPC to obscure APIs like WebObjects and systems with proprietary authorization schemes. Regardless of the techniques used, the struggles were mostly the same.

The critical factor to a successful API integration is getting insight into the bits and bytes that goes over the wire. The conditions to get there are:

• Have a setup where you can test the integration quickly. Eliminate the need to deploy a new version before you can try something.
• Familiarize yourself with the messages sent over the wire. SDKs are widespread but may cause trouble by hiding the technical details that break your app. In any case, you should be able to inspect this data. You'll often find issues with a quick inspection, but only if you're able to!
• Make sure that you're able to log messages that you did not initiate. That saves the day when clients report problems you cannot replicate. Beware that APIs might not behave as advertised. Hence, tools for problem analysis are essential.

Testing is often not (easily) possible in a local environment when external systems are involved. Therefore, we wanted to develop a platform that lets you build your APIs directly in the cloud, so you can test without compiling or deploying steps involved. Furthermore, this platform provides a logging facility to support troubleshooting.

Over the years, I've built a few prototypes to make API integrations easier. A few production sites still use them. Flowlet is their successor that comes with a fully fledged UI to write APIs, API integrations, and automated tasks.