About

Hi, I started working on Restpoint after feeling the pains of designing and developing countless APIs. My past and current roles have been to design APIs and pass artifacts to development teams to perform the final implementation of the API backend.

I would design the APIs and do what I could to get feedback. Getting good feedback is proportional to the quality of the artifacts. The artifacts must be engaging or else its difficult for people to provide meaningful feedback. Creating docs, API specs, mocks and other artifacts are "good" but I could never get great engagement from users with these artifacts.

And when API artifacts were sent to the dev team, this often started a cycle of interruptions for clarifications and rework of the design. This would continue until the beta was released, which then started a new round of rework now that users were actually using the API.

My idea was to go to the next level of mocking and create a real invokable API prototype that would engage users to get meaningful feedback. If you could test drive an API prototype backend that was just like the API beta would be, before any implementation starts, wouldn't that be great to find all the issues and fix early.

Most developers would say it's easy to build a prototype, spin up a webserver, database, add some quick code and you can get some simple requests and responses. Yes, that's true, I've done it. But this approach falls apart very fast when trying to prototype an API as complexity grows, databases need to be updated, nest JSON support, support all operations, show users and iterate.

So I started with an idea of why can't someone describe the API in a GUI then click a button to auto-generate a real working API backend prototype in the cloud so the prototype is available to anyone. But in order to be greatly engaging for users, the prototype must be able to handle requests and responses like a real API would.

It's been a side project of mine the last two years and I'm happy to say the idea has become reality. You can start up a browser and start designing an API in a GUI and click a button to auto deploy to real API backend in the cloud. The nice thing is anyone can design an API and generate the prototype without any coding. And, in order to make the API even more engaging for users, low code logic can be injected.

It's been a lot of fun and very interesting to overcome all the hurdles. And I still keep adding more features and try to keep documentation up to date. The service is free to use and I welcome email feedback to info at restpoint dot com.

...Bryan MacLean

P.S. If you need an API prototype designed, please contact me. A prototype can be designed very quickly and sent with documentation to your and users. Several iterations can be developed until your users sign off with confidence.

If you have any questions, please contact me at Twitter or email if you have any questions or would simply like a demo.