APIs Tools

API tooling covers the whole lifecycle: designing a contract, testing against it, publishing docs, and giving consumers something pleasant to work with.

The first fork is the paradigm. REST is the default and stays the right answer for most public and internal APIs — it's cacheable, well-understood, and every client speaks it. Query layers like GraphQL earn their complexity when clients genuinely need to shape their own responses and you'd otherwise be maintaining a growing set of bespoke endpoints. Choosing it for a single first-party frontend usually costs more than it returns.

The second is spec-first versus code-first. Writing the contract before the implementation keeps consumers and producers honest and makes generated clients and docs fall out for free. Code-first is faster to start and tends to drift. Either way, the tools in this category are largely about keeping the spec, the implementation and the documentation from disagreeing.