What is Postman?

Before learning about what Postman is, let us try to first understand about what is an API or REST API.

So, what is an API?

API

API stands for Application Programming Interface. From its full form, we can refer to Application as any software with a distinct function. And, Interface can be referred to as a medium between two applications. We can say that, an API is a software intermediary that allows two applications to communicate with each other.

Let us try to understand it with the help of an example.

The Weather forecast software system contains daily weather report and data. If we want to know about the weather update, the weather app in our mobile phone, communicates with the database system of weather bureau via APIs, and shows us the daily weather updates on our mobile phone application. Here, two applications are communicating via APIs. One application being our mobile application and the other one being database system of weather bureau.

Now, what is a REST API?

REST API

REST APIs are the most popular APIs found on web. REST stands for Representational State Transfer. It defines a set of basic functions such as – GET, PUT, DELETE, PATCH, etc, which clients can use to exchange data using HTTP.

We will not deep dive into APIs and REST APIs in this post. We will discuss about them later in details.

Now let us understand what a Postman is.

POSTMAN

Postman is a leading API platform convenient to build, test, design, modify, document and use REST APIs. It provides user interface for sending and viewing HTTP requests and responses.

FEATURES OF POSTMAN

The postman simplifies each step of API lifecycle and helps us in creating better APIs. Some of the features of postman are –

1. Tools – Postman offers a comprehensive set of tools that helps in the process of API lifecycle. It accelerates the process of designing, testing, documenting, and sharing our APIs.

2. API Repository – Postman helps to store, catalogue and collaborate around all of our APIs easily on one central platform by managing API specifications, storing test cases and results, etc.

3. Intelligence – Postman throws us alerts, security warnings and provides other intelligent insights and reporting on our APIs.

4. Workspaces – Postman platform provides us with flexible workspaces such as personal workspace, team workspace and public workspace, to organize our API work and collaborate across our organization or across the world.

5. Integrations - Postman integrates with important tools in our software development pipelines which enables API-first practices.

By now, we have covered all the basic theory of Postman needed for first. We can get postman for free to use, about which and more we will be discussing in upcoming posts.

Thankyou.