Articles

As part of our work to make Drupal 8 the leading CMS for developer portals, we are implementing a mechanism to import the OpenAPI (formerly known as Swagger) specification format. This is a crucial feature not only for dedicated developer portals, but also for all Drupal sites that are exposing an API. Now that it has become much easier to create a RESTful API service in Drupal 8, the next step is to make it more straightforward to create its API reference documentation. That is why we think our work will be useful for site builders, and not just for technical writers and API product owners.

Web APIs are not just useful when making headless sites in Drupal: large Drupal sites often hold valuable information that could also be useful outside the site's context. Media companies might want to expose historical media content, community sites could show data about their community activities, e-commerce sites tend to open an API for their affiliates and partners. While it is possible to use Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 as an API backend, a lot of functionalities that describe a mature API service do not come out of the box. In this post we will explain what key concepts you have to keep in mind when designing an API service, why they are important and how APIgee Edge can make it easier to build a full-featured API webservice in Drupal successfully.

In a talk we did at FOSDEM ‘17, Tamás Demeter-Haludka and I discuss __potential application areas of graph databases in existing open source CMSs like Drupal__.

SQL databases are really fast when you need all the information stored together in a record row, but they are a bad fit when you need to search for relationship patterns that are not already stored together in your database. A significant performance penalty is incurred for every additional table that needs to be joined for a query. That is why SQL databases are notoriously bad at deducting relationships from datasets. Graph databases however are really good at this task.

The main purpose of Platform Software Development Kits and Helper/Client Libraries is to accelerate and simplify development. A well maintained SDK is a trust signal that indicates the level of support and usage of your API for a language, framework, or development platform. In this post, we’ll look at how the developer portals in our research sample included SDKs.

Twilio is regarded as one of the API industry’s leaders, so when, after five years, Twilio changes the documentation format on their developer portal, everybody wants to know why. Jarod Reyes and Andrew Baker (both developers of Twilio's developer education team) gave a presentation about the reason for the changes at SIGNAL 2016. Because we found them valuable and wanted to share them with our developer portal mailinglist, we’ll summarize their findings in this blog post.