While India continues to witness a surge in investments for service-providing, app-based startups, there are hardly any who are actually developing products to help power up those complex back-ends. One of those very few, Bangalore-based Postman, has now grabbed a $1 Million round from Nexus Venture Partners, to help developers deploy apps in a speedy manner by using its API Development platform.
One of the biggest issues faced by developers constructing APIs, has been the cumbersome task of going back and forth through the entire production and development process, whenever one encounters an issue. However, Postman aims to cut-off that task and make your entire development cycle more efficient via its development platform.
With Postman, you can construct simple as well as complex requests quickly, save them for later use and analyse the responses sent by the API. Postman can dramatically cut down the time required to test and develop APIs. Postman is also extremely flexible. It adapts itself for individual developers, small teams or big organizations equally well.
Currently, over 1.5 Million developers already use Postman’s platform with over 800,000 of them being active. And almost all of those numbers have been achieved through word-of-mouth. More than half of those members are from the U.S., which involves developers from companies like Box, Microsoft.
Working with Postman is pretty much a breeze. You can start Postman through the Chrome App Launcher app. The Chrome App Launcher resides in your dock (OSX) or taskbar (Windows). You also get the option to keep a persistent icon for Postman that can bypass Chrome altogether.
The Postman interface is divided into two areas. The sidebar on the left and the request builder on the right. The request builder lets you create almost any kind of request quickly. Postman gives you tools to work with all four divisions of an HTTP request : the URL, method, headers, and the body.
To Capture your API requests, Postman has a unique tool in place called Postman Interceptor. What sets Postman Interceptor apart, is the fact that it can capture requests directly from Chrome and save them to Postman’s history, thus helping you in debugging your web app APIs in real-time.
In principle, Postman is like a Teamviewer or a Google Docs for API Developers. With Postman, you can work with your entire team collaboratively, in real-time and that too on multiple APIs. The entire debugging process can be done without you or your team being required to assemble at a central place physically, to develop the API.
With Postman Sync, all of your data is stored at one central place, which includes all of your API files and documentations. Postman Sync backs up your Postman collections, environments, and header presets instantly and makes it available on other systems where you are using Postman. Your data is stored and transferred securely on servers. There’s also a scrollable news feed appearing within your dashboard, which provides with updates related to any ongoing API development.
Postman is available for free, though in a limited, restricted mode. To get the full-fledged service, you are required to pay a minimal $49 fee which allows upto 10 developers to work together. And mind this, the kind of service you get, $4.9 per developer is one heck of a bargain.
