Improving Developers Success with APIMatic SDKs for Mashery APIs

Do you know what developers hate the most? They don’t hate working for 12 hours a day; they don’t even hate working over weekends. What they really hate is working on non-challenging and monotonous tasks.

A classic example is maintaining SDKs or client libraries for an API, which typically happens every time a provider updates their APIs. On the API provider side, maintaining an SDK or a client library is not just time consuming, but it’s also a monotonous task. On the consumption side, a developer would much rather focus on business logic and design of an app instead of trying to figure out how to communicate with an API — especially during hackathons where every second matters.

The solution? APIMatic

APIMatic generates SDKs for APIs automatically in all major programming languages so that developers can consume APIs in their favourite development environment with less code, in less time, with less effort, and with more fun.

SDKs for Mashery APIs with APIMatic

Mashery offers one of the best developer engagement programs in the API space. Reaching out directly to developers at over a hundred hackathons every year is really impressive, and that’s why a large number of API providers trust Mashery to showcase their APIs to the world.

APIMatic has collaborated with Mashery to provide SDKs/client libraries for Mashery powered RESTful APIs — ranging from Beats Music, Edmunds.com and many more. Automatically generated client libraries are available for iOS, Android, Javascript, Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, Go and .NET.

The idea is to make developers more productive by supplying SDKs in their favourite programming languages in addition to interactive documentation and other tools around  Mashery’s I/O Docs, all in a single place. This will make it easier for developers to use and adopt Mashery APIs.

Initial integration was successfully tested at a developers’ event with Edmunds Dealer and Vehicle APIs.

Painless SDK Maintenance — A Relief for API Providers

This integration mainly answers the criticism on SDKs that they are expensive to build and painful to update/maintain. Since the SDKs are automatically generated from I/O Docs there’s not a single line of code required to build and maintain the SDKs. The only requirement is to keep the API description up-to-date and leave the rest on APIMATIC’s crawler.

SDKs for Developers — The Way They Want!

Developers love having control over the code they’re working on. That’s why APIMatic gives them options to tweak the code they’re going to generate. From minor things such as prefixes and postfixes, to major stuff such as dynamic parameters and asynchronous code, developers have control over all aspects. The code generation settings can be accessed by exporting any API to APIMatic. Exporting an API also enables the developers to add request and response models (schema types) layer in the SDKs, which are currently not available in default ioDocs documents.

To conclude, supplementing the Mashery repository of APIs with high quality SDKs would probably be a win-win for Mashery customers, their internal developers, and 3rd party consumers. API providers will get much faster and economical access to more developer communities while application developers will enjoy the huge reduction in workload that could allow them to focus on other challenging and important stuff, and/or spend more time with their loved ones. After all, we all love developers :)

This blog post originally appeared on The Mashery Blog on May 26, 2015.