API Integration Developer Workflow with RapidAPI
APIs are consumed in web applications one way or another. If you plan to build a full-stack app, you will also create a REST or GraphQL API to let the client and server communicate. Moreover, you consume multiple web APIs to build a web app without realizing it is a web API.
The API use case is not limited to what I described above. We also often require public APIs to add features like weather information, payment gateways, authentication, etc.
Integrating these APIs properly in your web application is crucial; otherwise, you may not get what you expected. As the size of your application grows, the APIs become more and more challenging to integrate.
RapidAPI provides several API integration tools, like RapidAPI Hub, Enterprise Hub, and Teams, to help seamlessly integrate API in your web application. These integration tools can help you integrate APIs and make them more secure than before.
In this piece, let’s learn more about these API integration tools by RapidAPI and how they can improve your developer workflow. So without any further ado, let’s jump in!
RapidAPI Hub – Public API Integration Tool
When building web applications, you often need to consume third-party APIs. Finding the right one is important. You need to ensure that the API is maintained and has good documentation. Moreover, another important selection criterion is whether the API is secure against security threats.
Everything I just discussed takes a lot of time. Fortunately, RapidAPI provides a solution for it. With RapidAPI Hub, you can access over 35,000+ authenticated APIs in 46 different categories. Fortune 100 companies, like Google, Microsoft, etc., use RapidAPI Hub to let developer use their APIs.
Millions of developers use RapidAPI Hub daily to find and connect thousands of APIs. RapidAPI Hub processes billions of API calls monthly, thus, making it the world’s largest Hub for APIs.
Let’s take a look at what features of RapidAPI Hub make it the number 1 public API integration tool.
API Playground to Test API
RapidAPI Hub provides an API playground where you can test an API before integrating it inside your application. All you need is to subscribe to an API, select the API endpoint, and then click on the Test Endpoint button. This will make an API call inside the browser.
After a few seconds, you can look at the response right there in the API playground. This way, you can understand the API response before integrating it into your project.
Generate Code Snippets To Integrate API in Code
One of the best features of RapidAPI Hub is that it lets you generate code snippets to call your selected API in 19 different languages. Furthermore, you can also generate code snippets in different packages of each language.
These snippets are available on the API playground. You can select the language and the package from the dropdown menu. Once selected, the RapidAPI Hub will automatically generate the snippet, and then you can click the Copy Code button to copy it to your clipboard.
Lastly, just go back to your codebase and paste the code snippet to integrate the API into your application.
API Analysis Stats
If you randomly choose an API from the internet, you will not know whether it is reliable. With RapidAPI Hub, each API comes with three statistics, i.e., popularity, latency, and service level.
The popularity stats rate out of 10 (the higher the best). The latency of an API should be as low as possible, whereas the service level is a percentage that represents how quickly any downtime was addressed.
This way, you will know whether other community people actively use the API you choose to integrate into your application works or not.
API Security
One thing we can not compromise on is the security of our application. If we are using public APIs, we need to ensure they are secure. Otherwise, our application’s integrity can be compromised.
All the APIs on RapidAPI Hub requires an authentication key to consume them in an application. On top of this, RapidAPI provides the API providers access to security features that provide solutions to 10 OWASP API security risks.
RapidAPI for Teams - API Integration Tool for Teams
A product-based company often has several APIs that need to be integrated across its products. Although it looks simple enough, in reality, it is not. The integration of internal APIs often becomes challenging when multiple developers are involved.
There is another scenario where your team needs an external paid API. Let’s say you subscribe to the said API. Now, you would want a way to share it with your team so that all members can access it and integrate it into the product.
RapidAPI has a perfect solution to help you with all this API integration. With RapidAPI for Teams, you can share, publish, and collaborate on your APIs in a private workspace.
Let’s look at the features of this API integration tool by RapidAPI for your teams.
Publishing
You can create an organization account using RapidAPI for Teams. Within this organization, you will access RapidAPI’s familiar provider interface with added features for publishing APIs. Depending on your team's need, you can make these APIs public or private.
You can set custom permissions for an API inside RapidAPI for Teams. This way, your API will only be exposed to the developer who needs it to integrate into the company product.
RapidAPI for Teams also allows you to get started quickly by bulk importing your existing APIs from GitHub. They have to be in OpenAPI Format.
Consumption
For starters, the private workspace allows you to search for an API in your organization or even look up a specific API endpoint to integrate into the product. The organization provides a developer dashboard that shows detailed analytics like latencies, costs, requests per endpoint, and consumption of the subscribed APIs. These are all super helpful features.
Governance
Whether your team sells APIs or consumes them internally, the private workspace allows you to manage them conveniently through one dashboard. Access control allows you to give or restrict API access to members.
RapidAPI for Teams is a management, collaboration, and API integration tool that can help you and your team streamline the API integration process. With additional features, you can monetize your existing APIs and earn passive income using them.
Wrap Up
That’s all for today, folks! API Integrations tools offered by RapidAPI provide everything you or your organization need for successful API integration. Moreover, it provides additional features like deep search, multiple API collections, discussion forums, etc, to help you choose and integrate APIs in your application.
If you want to learn more deeply about RapidAPI Hub, I recommend you read this article. Also, if you are interested in learning about API testing tools that RapidAPI offers, read this article we have written.