Apiary: Beautiful API docs, raises seed round, adds premium features | Hacker News Reader

Apiary: Beautiful API docs, raises seed round, adds premium features

blog.apiary.io

118 pointszzen34 comments

Good luck... Love the design.

I can't help but wonder... a person experienced enough to design a REST API wouldn't need or want to rely on said service just to mock it up. I don't see a market for Apiary.

At least in the node.js community, there are lots of tools and projects for mocking REST APIs. Why should I spend the time to sign-up and pay for Apiary, when I could already mock an API in that time instead?

> TCP dumps, Wireshark, installing local HTTP proxies… Not fun.

Developers should be able to debug the freakin' API they are supposed to be building! If someone needs Wireshark or HTTP proxies to debug their code, they are doing it very wrong.

> Your developers suck if they can't debug the freakin' API they are supposed to be building. You're doing it very very wrong if you need wireshark or HTTP proxies to debug your code.

And what if I am using a library to connect to a 3rd party service (i.e. github) and I'd like to debug my API calls?

You shouldn't be coding things to be so tightly coupled. You should be able to build and test your API without communicating with a 3rd party.

Sure, there are cases where you have to use a proxy to see a request. I'm surprised there's a market for people who pay for that.

There are so many scenarios for debugging APIs that don't fall into the "I control both ends, so I should be able to see everything." camp. SDKs, poorly implemented or documented APIs controlled by a 3rd party (frequently even across a company where the people producing are far removed from the consumers), differing environments (works locally, not in staging, etc), UI-less machine-to-machine interactions (debugging webhooks is especially annoying) and many more.

If you check my bio, you'll see my bias toward these problems. But there are a lot more of them and a lot more variants than you give credit to.

You're right about end-to-end control. But, my point is I don't see the future of web development consisting of 3rd party PaaS services.

Are you saying you'd pay for Apiary to debug HTTP requests? How did you solve this issue before? There are many open source libraries to do exactly this.

I just can't imagine a future where development tooling consists of subscription to a bunch of disparate services.

> I just can't imagine a future where development tooling consists of subscription to a bunch of disparate services.

New Relic, Exceptional/Airbrake, SendGrid/Mandrill, Codeship/CircleCI, Github, etc. You can do all of those on your own, but we pay for all these services quite often. Apiary may not be your cup of tea, but I think people will pay for it.

ah... I see you're the founder of Runscope now. I would be more inclined to use something like Runscope where - unlike Apiary - the value proposition is very clear and you're focused on doing one thing and doing it well.

Web scrapers (there's a lot of them, SeoMoz is even one of them) is a pretty big market for that kind of stuff.

Actual Apiary user here. Couldn't care less about the mocking up part. I use it because it's a fantastic tool for writing good-looking API documentation quickly.

Also a user. Another big use case is developing for mobile against the planned API while the API is still being developed.

And for systems where the API is provided by several different apps rather than just one, it's nice to have a centralized spec for everyone to conform to. Eventually it's supposed to test your api against your spec, which would be nice.

Is is just me, or are their docs kind of yuck/hard to read?

http://docs.timdorr.apiary.io/#vehiclecommands

My biggest problem: way too much visual emphasis on 'GET' part and not enough on the actual URL. That has way more priority, to me.

I think they look great. I could imagine having a few nitpicks, but never describing them as "yuck"

I like the swagger layout. http://swagger.wordnik.com/#!/pet

Their developer documentation is kind of tricky to figure out though.

I liked swagger a lot, but could never get it working with my API because it's too opinionated. From the little I tried to do, there was no way at all to tell it to document the API the way I had designed it, rather than the way it thought APIs should be designed.

Nice layout.

Reminds me of IO/Docs which I use actively for my own application. I like the ability to "try it yourself" though a mix of it with "here is the default response if it works, here is the response if it fails" is better for POST/PUT/DELETE routes.

I actually agree and find them very unappealing. They seem too dense and the text either too light, too small, or both.

I'm bit biased. I'm running a marketplace for APIs since 2010 but defining itself like the largest API Hub is a bit false. It's doesn't matter how many APIs you have, since the majority of those are "fake, draft, etc" not real working APIs, they are mocks. What makes you substantial is: 1) # of API transactions passing via you "apps in production running on you", 2) # of total active developers in your community "hub = consumers + providers not just one side" 3) money "enterprise customers, revenue, subscriptions, etc"

Real activity, not mocks.

Congrats on the funding. However, I'm not sure what Apiary does, or why I'd use it. Could someone help me? Is it an API mocking tool? A documentation tool? Both? Can I use it next to my existing source tree?

Hi,

thanks!

Yes, it is both and yes, you can add it to your source tree through our github integration.

Our idea is to have a human-readable, human-writeable DSL to describe your API. From there, we generate both documentation, mocks, debugging proxy and tests.

You can use it to describe your existing APIs, but in my mind, our biggest value lies in conversation around API design that happens before you start implementing.

Hope this helps!

Hi, I'm not sure if I'm alone in this, but I personally hate to document my code outside my code. Is there any way to make apiary scan my existing codebase for, say. API documentation and generate docs based on that?

Hi, there are some 3rd party works in progress and we will promote them. We are leaving this to community though, as respective languages/frameworks are best supported by people that use them.

And as said -- Apiary is more about design than documentation and writing blueprint should take place before writing code. A lot of things is lost when it's the other way around.

Does anyone know how this compares to wordnik's Swagger [1] ? I think Swagger is incredible, would love to see more API tools which promote good habits and make it easy to be beautiful.

[1] https://developers.helloreverb.com/swagger/

The mock server generated out of a minimal markdown-like syntax seems pretty cool.

As far as the docs themselves I think I prefer the design of something like Swagger (https://developers.helloreverb.com/swagger/).

In related news nobody upvoted, rich-client focused web APIs may be becoming an endangered species: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6392022

This is awesome.. And Immediately runs into the problem of being purely SaaS. I can't use this for APIs that I develop internally within my 'Big Company'.

If I could host this somewhere behind my firewall, then something like this becomes a no brainer. But making me try to convince my security team to send all of my API calls and design to an external service puts a huge barrier to entry for me politically.

I love the idea to the point that I started searching for something similar that I could host inside. Even Github lets me host a copy of their software somewhere nice and corporate safe.

I wish more service providers would offer more than just 'pure SaaS' to allow for easier adoption by corporate customers.

I do believe we'll be providing on-premise instances as Github does in the future.

However, as github hasn't provided this from year one, so are we. Choosing priorities is hard in startup and on-premise takes a lot of resources.

...which is what seed is for ;)

Meanwhile, you can still use our format separately from Apiary SaaS. Please take a look: http://apiblueprint.org/

Awesome. I really like the design and simplicity. From the example on http://apiary.io/how-it-works how are language bindings generated? How do you know the schema of a message?

I've actually been working on something similar, but more focused on library generation and like a "npm for APIs", e.g. reusable schemas. Instead of markdown I'm using something more akin to Google's Discovery Document (https://developers.google.com/discovery/v1/reference/apis#re...).

A number of related solutions for web services integration:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/181593/16090

Not sure how we've ended up in that category. Apiary doesn't generate or manage license keys. And frankly, it doesn't do API management at all. We're helping people design & build APIs.

Thanks for pointing that out! When I was researching the topic of API management earlier this year, Apiary.io was in beta. If you'd like, I can take it out of the list.

I love the design! I think it is great :)

"Brigtht Future for Us All"

Thanks for pointing out the typo. Fixed.

Amazing news, well done Apiary.

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