I am excited to announce that Rapid has joined forces with the team behind leading API design solution Paw and are adding it into the RapidAPI platform as RapidAPI Design. Together, we will offer a more tightly integrated workflow from designing and developing APIs with Paw, to testing and monitoring them with RapidAPI Testing, to sharing and managing them on the RapidAPI Marketplace or RapidAPI Enterprise Hub.
We view APIs and microservices as the fundamental building blocks for modern software. Our goal is to provide the best possible platform for developers – from building APIs to consuming them. Paw is an indispensable part of the API development process, your “copilot” – helping you design and develop your API. It plays a crucial role in our platform and thus we are deeply invested in not just embedding it in the RapidAPI suite, but also improving and expanding it aggressively.
As a first step, we are making it more widely available by implementing support for Web, Windows, and Linux versions. Paw has traditionally been a Mac-only tool. While I think it is worth switching to Mac for, we decided we won’t judge, and thus the next version (launching in beta today), will be available on the web, and as a desktop app on any platform. The Paw team has worked furiously to make this possible, and along the way, we have adapted and upgraded the Paw UI to take it from its Mac-native approach into a universal app. You can see more about the process here.
We are also working on expanding the Paw product to offer more tooling for API developers. Paw is already the most advanced API design and development tool available, with support for powerful features like dynamic values, environments, authentication flows, and the most advanced sharing platform – with full git style management of API collaboration and versioning. We have added to that by launching GraphQL support in 2020, and have a very aggressive roadmap to keep pushing Paw forward in 2021.
My personal story with Paw starts many years ago, when I was developing my first apps for the iPhone and was looking for a tool to help me locally design and debug the API (which was written in PHP 5!). Out of all the apps I found – Paw was the only one that offered all the advanced features I wanted to quicken my workflow (dynamic values, custom code generators, environments) and a developer experience that just felt right.
As I got deeper into the API space, I always used Paw as my go-to API tool (it has always been on my Mac dock right next to Chrome and VSCode). Quickly a lot of our engineering team at RapidAPI started using it too.
Fast forward to 2020, we started looking at API design and how to better enable developers as they are building APIs on RapidAPI. All along, Paw always shined as a north star for us. Eventually, I connected with Micha and shared some of our views – and we quickly discovered we share a lot of ideals around creating developer tools and systems, and both saw a lot of potential in joining forces in building the best API platform out there.
We view Paw as an integral part of the RapidAPI platform and plan to invest considerable resources in advancing and improving it. Together we are a strong team and I couldn’t be more excited about what we have coming next!
Leave a Reply