
Apiary: Beautiful API docs, raises seed round, adds premium features - zzen
http://blog.apiary.io/2013/09/17/Apiary-Is-Growing/
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dreamdu5t
Good luck... Love the design.

I can't help but wonder... a person experienced enough to design a REST API
wouldn't need or want to rely on said service just to mock it up. I don't see
a market for Apiary.

At least in the node.js community, there are lots of tools and projects for
mocking REST APIs. Why should I spend the time to sign-up and pay for Apiary,
when I could already mock an API in that time instead?

> TCP dumps, Wireshark, installing local HTTP proxies… Not fun.

Developers should be able to debug the freakin' API they are supposed to be
building! If someone needs Wireshark or HTTP proxies to debug their code, they
are doing it very wrong.

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Almad
> Your developers suck if they can't debug the freakin' API they are supposed
> to be building. You're doing it very very wrong if you need wireshark or
> HTTP proxies to debug your code.

And what if I am using a library to connect to a 3rd party service (i.e.
github) and I'd like to debug my API calls?

~~~
dreamdu5t
You shouldn't be coding things to be so tightly coupled. You should be able to
build and test your API without communicating with a 3rd party.

Sure, there are cases where you have to use a proxy to see a request. I'm
surprised there's a market for people who pay for that.

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johns
There are so many scenarios for debugging APIs that don't fall into the "I
control both ends, so I should be able to see everything." camp. SDKs, poorly
implemented or documented APIs controlled by a 3rd party (frequently even
across a company where the people producing are far removed from the
consumers), differing environments (works locally, not in staging, etc), UI-
less machine-to-machine interactions (debugging webhooks is especially
annoying) and many more.

If you check my bio, you'll see my bias toward these problems. But there are a
lot more of them and a lot more variants than you give credit to.

~~~
dreamdu5t
You're right about end-to-end control. But, my point is I don't see the future
of web development consisting of 3rd party PaaS services.

Are you saying you'd pay for Apiary to debug HTTP requests? How did you solve
this issue before? There are many open source libraries to do exactly this.

I just can't imagine a future where development tooling consists of
subscription to a bunch of disparate services.

~~~
timdorr
> I just can't imagine a future where development tooling consists of
> subscription to a bunch of disparate services.

New Relic, Exceptional/Airbrake, SendGrid/Mandrill, Codeship/CircleCI, Github,
etc. You can do all of those on your own, but we pay for all these services
quite often. Apiary may not be your cup of tea, but I think people will pay
for it.

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killahpriest
Is is just me, or are their docs kind of yuck/hard to read?

[http://docs.timdorr.apiary.io/#vehiclecommands](http://docs.timdorr.apiary.io/#vehiclecommands)

My biggest problem: way too much visual emphasis on 'GET' part and not enough
on the actual URL. That has way more priority, to me.

~~~
tieTYT
I like the swagger layout.
[http://swagger.wordnik.com/#!/pet](http://swagger.wordnik.com/#!/pet)

Their developer documentation is kind of tricky to figure out though.

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StavrosK
I liked swagger a lot, but could never get it working with my API because it's
too opinionated. From the little I tried to do, there was no way at all to
tell it to document the API the way I had designed it, rather than the way it
thought APIs should be designed.

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sinzone
I'm bit biased. I'm running a marketplace for APIs since 2010 but defining
itself like the largest API Hub is a bit false. It's doesn't matter how many
APIs you have, since the majority of those are "fake, draft, etc" not real
working APIs, they are mocks. What makes you substantial is: 1) # of API
transactions passing via you "apps in production running on you", 2) # of
total active developers in your community "hub = consumers + providers not
just one side" 3) money "enterprise customers, revenue, subscriptions, etc"

Real activity, not mocks.

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bdesimone
Congrats on the funding. However, I'm not sure what Apiary does, or why I'd
use it. Could someone help me? Is it an API mocking tool? A documentation
tool? Both? Can I use it next to my existing source tree?

~~~
Almad
Hi,

thanks!

Yes, it is both and yes, you can add it to your source tree through our github
integration.

Our idea is to have a human-readable, human-writeable DSL to describe your
API. From there, we generate both documentation, mocks, debugging proxy and
tests.

You can use it to describe your existing APIs, but in my mind, our biggest
value lies in conversation around API design that happens before you start
implementing.

Hope this helps!

~~~
stingraycharles
Hi, I'm not sure if I'm alone in this, but I personally hate to document my
code outside my code. Is there any way to make apiary scan my existing
codebase for, say. API documentation and generate docs based on that?

~~~
Almad
Hi, there are some 3rd party works in progress and we will promote them. We
are leaving this to community though, as respective languages/frameworks are
best supported by people that use them.

And as said -- Apiary is more about design than documentation and writing
blueprint should take place before writing code. A lot of things is lost when
it's the other way around.

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jaytaylor
Does anyone know how this compares to wordnik's Swagger [1] ? I think Swagger
is incredible, would love to see more API tools which promote good habits and
make it easy to be beautiful.

[1]
[https://developers.helloreverb.com/swagger/](https://developers.helloreverb.com/swagger/)

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nopassrecover
The mock server generated out of a minimal markdown-like syntax seems pretty
cool.

As far as the docs themselves I think I prefer the design of something like
Swagger
([https://developers.helloreverb.com/swagger/](https://developers.helloreverb.com/swagger/)).

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contingencies
In related news nobody upvoted, rich-client focused web APIs may be becoming
an endangered species:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6392022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6392022)

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shunter
This is awesome.. And Immediately runs into the problem of being purely SaaS.
I can't use this for APIs that I develop internally within my 'Big Company'.

If I could host this somewhere behind my firewall, then something like this
becomes a no brainer. But making me try to convince my security team to send
all of my API calls and design to an external service puts a huge barrier to
entry for me politically.

I love the idea to the point that I started searching for something similar
that I could host inside. Even Github lets me host a copy of their software
somewhere nice and corporate safe.

I wish more service providers would offer more than just 'pure SaaS' to allow
for easier adoption by corporate customers.

~~~
Almad
I do believe we'll be providing on-premise instances as Github does in the
future.

However, as github hasn't provided this from year one, so are we. Choosing
priorities is hard in startup and on-premise takes a lot of resources.

...which is what seed is for ;)

Meanwhile, you can still use our format separately from Apiary SaaS. Please
take a look: [http://apiblueprint.org/](http://apiblueprint.org/)

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connerbryan
Awesome. I really like the design and simplicity. From the example on
[http://apiary.io/how-it-works](http://apiary.io/how-it-works) how are
language bindings generated? How do you know the schema of a message?

I've actually been working on something similar, but more focused on library
generation and like a "npm for APIs", e.g. reusable schemas. Instead of
markdown I'm using something more akin to Google's Discovery Document
([https://developers.google.com/discovery/v1/reference/apis#re...](https://developers.google.com/discovery/v1/reference/apis#resource)).

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thangalin
A number of related solutions for web services integration:

[http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/181593/16090](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/181593/16090)

~~~
zzen
Not sure how we've ended up in that category. Apiary doesn't generate or
manage license keys. And frankly, it doesn't do API management at all. We're
helping people design & build APIs.

~~~
thangalin
Thanks for pointing that out! When I was researching the topic of API
management earlier this year, Apiary.io was in beta. If you'd like, I can take
it out of the list.

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hopopopo
I love the design! I think it is great :)

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Ono-Sendai
"Brigtht Future for Us All"

~~~
zzen
Thanks for pointing out the typo. Fixed.

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philjackson
Amazing news, well done Apiary.

