API mocks are not enough, we are instead interested in ways APIs can be composed and orchestratedFoundation series - Tenet 2

API endpoint Mocks are useful, no doubt on that. Mocks are well established in the industry and here to stay. There's however a space to explore beyond mocks: their composition.

In our humble opinion, mocks are more interesting in writing automated test suites and CI, where you as a developer SET a FIXED state of a given endpoint in order to EXPECT a FIXED outcome for your application.

But, the phase before tests is where developers spend most of their time: the DESIGN and IDEATION time. In that time, we want to be free to design complex interactions and play with DYNAMIC states of API endpoints. I should, for instance be able to flip my application behavior from displaying an empty list, to displaying a single item, to displaying 100 items in a paginated fashion. And that combined with items creation and deletion in between these phases. With mocks, that becomes a tedious endeavor, because you need to bear the cognitive workload to track every composition every-time.

Does that resonate with your past or present experience? If so, you are at the right place, Apidojo aims to alleviate these difficulties by allowing you to design these complex interactions at an upper level: from the sandboxes scenarios.