VueConf US 2023

Talks

1. State of the Vuenion

Evan You

2. Monitoring Your Production Vue Apps

Abhijeet Prasad

3. Proven Pinia Patterns

Adam Jahr

4. Building Data-Intensive Visualization Applications with Vue

Alex Harding

5. What to love about Vue in 2023

Alex Kyriakidis

6. Build & Deploy Mobile Apps with Nuxt Ionic

Cecelia Martinez

7. Patterns for Large Scale Vue.js Applications

Daniel Kelly

8. Speed up your development flow with Vite

Felipe Flor

9. Freak'n Keyboard Traps

Homer Gaines

10. The Next Vuetify

John Leider

11. Conquering Forms in Vue

Justin Schroeder

12. Appetite for Components

Lee Martin

13. Testing Vue Components with Cypress

Mark Noonan

14. Render when? Render where? Render why? Render what?

Phil Hawksworth

15. 10 things about Postman everyone should know

Pooja Mistry

16. Vue to the Edge

Sébastien Chopin

17. Demystifying the Dreaded A/B Test

Chris Demars

18. Introducing unjs

Daniel Roe

19. Nuxt SSG: Strategies & Pitfalls

David Nahodyl

20. Building Your First Open Source Project

Erik Hanchett

21. Two Keys to AI's Future

Gant Laborde

22. Building Desktop Apps with Vue

J.D. Hillen

23. DevOps before there was "devops"

Jeremy Meiss

24. Session Replay

Ryan Albrecht

25. Vue.js: Building Secure Applications

Tyler Clark

10 things about Postman everyone should know

10 things about Postman everyone should know

Pooja Mistry

Thank you so much for inviting me. I wanna say thanks to Pratik and the team of UConn for inviting me. With all the different frameworks in the JavaScript space, I have to be honest, not very familiar with Vue, but I’m really excited to be here with Angular and React and Vue. You know, it’s a little bit hard for me to keep up, but I do hope that Postman is something that all of you developers have worked with and can stay on top of. So by the end of this talk, I hope I teach you guys something new, something that will make you feel like, whoa, that’s cool, I didn’t know about that, and I’m really excited to get started. So with that, I wanted to introduce myself. So, yeah, I love the introduction. I am a proud plant mom, but along with doing that, I’m a developer advocate at Postman. And so who’s heard of Postman? Can I get a show of hands? All right, wonderful.

We have like a nice crowd of people that have, you know, heard of Postman, maybe have used it to send an API request here or there, but Postman is an API platform that is used by 25 million people around the world. So it’s really popular in the API development space and we are always coming out with some interesting features. And so, you know, it’s an ever-changing product and it’s useful in a lot of different ways. So I’m hoping I can take this time to show you something cool and something you haven’t heard of before in the world of Postman. So, before we get started, the API ecosystem is a global and growing ecosystem. So I have a little bit of stats on that.

So on a day-to-day basis, we have over 855 million requests being sent worldwide. So you can see that everything runs on APIs, and with that, we’re moving towards this thing called the API First World. So from our laptops, to the cars we drive, to the refrigerators we own, to the robot vacuums, to our lights, to everything that we own and have, it’s all kind of driven by APIs as well as all the web applications that you all developers are creating and are building. So API is the cornerstone of most modern applications that we have today. And so with that, I wanted to introduce like the Postman app. And most of you maybe have seen this app, have used it, have used it to send maybe a HTTP request, got some interesting data back. Hopefully you got a status 200. And so, you know, you’re using this to kind of get some data from your APIs, but Postman is just so much more than just a place to just send API requests. It’s now becoming a place where it is a place to document your APIs, it’s a workspace to work collaboratively, it’s a place to work with environments, it’s a place to chain requests, work with open source tools, explore APIs, develop APIs, monitor, test, do so many different things with APIs.

So it’s becoming this overall end-to-end platform that’s not only useful for testing, but it’s also useful for development and allows both the producer of the API, which are the API creators, and the API consumers, the testers of the APIs, the explorers of APIs, to work hand in hand in a single platform. So maybe the Postman you used a couple of years ago where you’re sending requests is probably different from the Postman you see today where you are able to not only discover the APIs that you’re finding, you’re able to develop them, you’re able to deploy APIs, test, define, kind of work hand in hand in this whole life cycle. So this talk is all about the 10 things you should know about Postman. I hope some of this is new to you, maybe some of it is not, but I’m gonna dive into some of the 10 features that I think a lot of people might have missed when they have worked with Postman. So, when we get started, I wanna jump right into this.

So I actually have created a workspace, it’s a public workspace, and I’m going to be working off of this workspace. So feel free to take a picture of that QR code or fork that collection, so we have a little bit of terminology, similar to GitHub, where you can fork collections within Postman. And this is your resource and your public place where everything I’ll be talking about today, you’ll get a little bit of deeper insight into. So, let’s get started. I have a timer, so I’m gonna set that and I’m a little behind, but all right. So let’s get into the workspace. So within the workspace, this is the Postman public workspace. So if you think about a public workspace, it’s a place where you can do all the things you wanna do with your APIs. So we have collections here, you can build APIs, you can work with environment variables.

And what you can do here is that since it’s a public workspace, to get working with some of these APIs, all you’ll have to do is create a fork. So when you create a fork, this allows you to basically play around with any collection in your own workspace. So I’m gonna go ahead and dive into my own workspace and I’ll show you a little bit about all the different things you can do with Postman. So the first feature that I wanted to dive into is, did anyone know that Postman has its own API? No? Okay. Well, Postman has its own API, and this API allows you to get all the information about your collections, your environments, your mocks, monitors, anything that you’re working with and within Postman. So here I have, I’m using the Postman api.getpostman.com to basically get all the environments that I have available in my collection. So you might be wondering, where am I getting this data from and what kind of IDs can I use with this API? So with environments, we have a bunch of environments, these are called environment variables. You can create environment variables that allow you to work dynamically with your collection requests and you can also work with global environments. You have specific IDs for your collection themselves.

So here, I have an ID for my collection. So if I have an API that allows me to get all the collections that I’ve created, get information about single collections, get information about my own workspace, my environments. So I can get a lot of information from basically the Postman workspace that I’ve been working on. And you might be wondering, okay, so that’s cool. Why is that even important? Well, it’s important because you can actually do a lot of interesting automation. If you’re using the Postman API and you want to run all of your collections using our CLI called Newman, you can use the Postman collections API along with your APIP and you can dynamically run every single test within your collection using our CLI tool to the open source called Newman. So this is really important if you wanna do a little bit of automation here and there. So that is a cool feature that if you haven’t heard of, I wanted to share that with you. So the second feature I wanted to dive into is working with multiple protocols. So how many people have used Postman to work with HTTP requests? Okay.

How many people have used Postman to work with GraphQL requests? All right. GRPC? Web sockets? All right. So, with Postman, there are a lot more protocols beyond the HTTP requests that you can work with. And so we have a really cool API called the Postman Echo API, and basically, the Postman Echo API allows users to basically echo back anything that they’re sending within their body request. So, for here, I’m sending a request body that I actually have set as a collection variable. So it’s just some JSON that I have set right here. Whatever I want to send within this API, I can send and I get that data back accordingly. So this might be really useful for the testers out there, right? So if you wanna create a simple API and you want to echo back the data that you were interested in retrieving, you can always create a HTTP Echo example. So this could be a get request, this could be a, you know, a post request.

So here, I can get back any of the parameter data that I have available and I can echo that back and I can use that information here. With GraphQL, we recently came out with a GraphQL request that’s really interesting and it uses introspection that’s enabled and you’re able to run GraphQL queries relatively seamlessly with Postman as well. So all you would have to do is create a GraphQL request and you can create your GraphQL, you can query your GraphQL APIs accordingly. So here I have a query example. I can also do a mutation example where I can send out mutations as well, create the right, you know, mutation, and I can work with subscriptions where I can also get all the data back as well using our GraphQL client. So I like to think of GraphQL as like working like a vending machine with APIs and you just have to select like D4 and you get the chips or something like that. I think it’s interesting comparatively to working with the rest. So we have a lot of support for multiple protocols. And another interesting thing I wanted to share with you all is I asked someone at the speaker’s dinner, which popular websites are created with Vue.js and somebody told me Nintendo is a popular website that’s created with Vue.

And so you can do a lot of interesting things with Postman where you can get a lot of the data from your web application as you’re testing them into your Postman. So here, if I were to take a look at all the requests that I was getting back from this website, I can always take a request and copy as a curl and import it directly into Postman and I should get all of the parameters as well. And then another interesting thing is I can also copy everything as a hard file and put that into Postman and I should get all the requests as well. So this is something that if you’re interested in doing a lot more deep dive testing into your APIs, you can get more deeper into testing. And then the other thing I wanted to share with you all is the Postman Interceptor, which is a interesting way to also do a lot of testing where if you wanted to capture all the requests of a dynamic website, you can get the data all kind of reflected accordingly. So this is a way to kind of work dynamically with your web applications and also do more testing when it comes to working with multiple different APIs.

So just a couple of things I wanted to share with you there. So the next example I wanted to share is the Postman Visualizer. So the Postman Visualizer is interesting because you can actually write your HTML and CSS within Postman and visualize your data. So some of you might know, are creating APIs, but you wanna visualize what that outcome looks like. So here I have a echo example where I’m, you know, sending this data. If I send this data, I can then visualize it accordingly. So this is simple. Basically what this does is you can set a HTML template within Postman and then do a visualizer.set and then you’re able to basically set your template. So with that, you can create things like charts, which is interesting. I was doing a livestream on the DALL-E APIs from Open AI.

So I have an example where if I’m working with some images, I can visualize that and get the images that I wanted to get as well. I don’t know if the internet is working properly, but you can also get some interesting images there. And so this is a great way to not only create requests and send out collections with the APIs that you’re interested in, but you can also do a lot more deep dive visualizations within Postman. And so that’s a little bit interesting there. So with that, you can create completely interesting applications. So, here, I wanted to create an application that was using multiple requests to get some data and I was able to basically set my entire HTML CSS into Postman. I’m using the D3 JS library here and I’m able to do some visualization where I can visualize my teammates on my map. So that’s a pretty interesting thing. And I haven’t really played around with the View Library, but I would assume that it works relatively similarly where you can put that into a template as well. So that’s visualizations. And it gets really interesting when you’re, you know, they’re important when you’re trying to share your collections and you want to, you know, do some interesting visual- I think there was a talk on visualizations earlier, so maybe something to try out as you’re playing around with Postman. So, finally, the next feature I wanted to talk about is working with a lot of interesting inbuilt libraries.

So we have a lot of interesting inbuilt libraries. Some of my favorite libraries are prebuilt into Postman, like, for example, you can do some data faking within Postman. So that’s always an interesting and useful library. I think we have like 12 different types of libraries. And then you can always import libraries within Postman to also work effectively as well. And then the one really other, the fifth feature that I wanted to dive into is workflow control. So workflow control, if you have multiple APIs and you want to control how these APIs interact with each other, how they’re taking data from one API into an another, there’s a lot of inbuilt workflow control that you’re able to work with. So, for example, if I have these four requests, I can control exactly which request runs at which time. So we have a method called set next request. So this allows me to run my request in specific orders. So you might be wondering, okay, how do I go about running your request?

So you can always run requests manually, but we also have the collection runner, which lets you run a little bit more dynamically manually. You can set different iterations. And so when you run these Postman requests, you can basically set multiple different variations. So I wanted to dive a little bit more about workflow controls. So I wrote this blog and it’s about the three ways to build workflows within Postman. So in this example, I talk about chaining individual requests. So you can always chain multiple requests together by using environment. So here, I have an example where I am trying to get some data and I’m using the environment.set, so I’m setting my property, and then in my next request, I can also get that data and parse. So I’m using pmenvironment.get. So I can chain requests by setting and getting data from environment variables. And then that allows you to build an entirely dynamic workflow. You can also send asynchronous requests, so you can send requests within requests. So, for example, this is using the pm.send request method.

So in this scenario, I can basically, I have probably 20 requests. In this example, the first folder, I have 20 requests doing one thing, I can do all 20 of those requests in a single request by using asynchronous requests where I can set the HTML CSS as well as send multiple APIs within those requests. So here I’m sending another API within an API to get that visualization that I had shown you. And then, finally, you can loop through your requests by using the postman.set next request where some requests get done before another request gets started. So there are a lot of different ways to work dynamically, especially if you are testing your APIs and you’re trying to come up with different test methods of working with your APIs. You can think about the various different ways to set different workflows within Postman. So that’s the fifth feature that I wanted to dive into. And now we’re going to be talking about mock servers.

So mock servers are really interesting because we all need to fake our data sometimes. There might be a backend team working on an API, but like a front end team that needs that API to do something else, but before they get done, you need to test and, you know, we all have different timelines in terms of that. So one interesting thing that you can do is you can actually mock your API. So here, if you wanted to mock your API, all you would have to do is basically mock this collection, and when you mock this collection, it creates a mock server. So a mock server is basically a specific URL that you can hit and you could set the different examples that you might be interested in. So, here, I have an example where I’m working with, I have a mock server that I already have set up here. So this is basically, if I were to copy this URL, this is a URL that is set within my mock environment that I can basically edit as an API itself. So for example, if I’m going to talk about how to mock this particular API where I’m retrieving details for a particular customer, I can always change the example of what my output is.

So, for example, if I were to test this in production, and I can change the ID, things like that, if I were to set my environment variable here and try that API out, you can see that the data that I get back is basically the data that I’m interested in testing. So think about working collaboratively with your teammates and think about mocking some of your APIs to help you test better and then plugging in those pieces as they get developed. So that’s another really great feature if you haven’t worked with mock servers as well. And then I wanted to talk about collection level information, which is our seventh feature. And basically, collection level information allows you to test at various levels of the hierarchy. So within Postman, you can test at an individual test level or you can test at a collection level where you can add your tests within the collection, which will, you know, encapsulate, well, in this case, this is the folder level, so this is going to encapsulate all the tests that you have available at the folder level. And then you can also test within your collection level if you add some tests, which will encapsulate all the tests at the collection level. So this allows you to do a lot more, you know, testing in different ways.

So you don’t have to stick to just your workspace or your folder to do higher level testing. So this is an example where you can set a lot of different information in different ways where you’re able to perform different actions at various different levels. And then I wanted to dive into scheduled runs and automated runs. So I showed a little bit about Newman, which is our open source CLI. We also have our Postman CLI, which allows you to do CICD with various different CICD integrations, but I wanted to dive a little bit more into scheduled runs before I go into that. So scheduled runs allows you to test at various different like times of the day. You can set different iterations of when you want to hit your APIs and you can get a full complete monitor of your API’s performance as you go about testing.

So to go ahead and run your scheduled runs, you can always run your folder and then you can schedule your run, which allows you to set your run frequency as well as your run environments as well as any files that you wanna run against, whether those are CSV files, JSON files, et cetera. So you’re able to run at various different frequencies and run a little bit more dynamically here. If you wanted to run using the Postman CLI, you can also integrate this Postman CLI command and you can run on any CICD provider such as CircleCI, GitLab, Jenkins. So this allows you to run your tests across your pipelines and across different operating systems as well. So this gets a little bit more deeper into automated testing and CICD. And then I wanted to share, for those of you who might be performance testers out there, we also have a new integration for performance testing, which allows you to set the load of what APIs you wanna hit and at the various frequencies.

This is a new feature, so you can actually request early access to this feature if that’s something you’re interested in. I’m happy to share this out for those of you who wanna try performance testing with Postman as well. And so that’s another feature that I wanted to dive into. And then the second to last feature, which I think is a lot of fun and interesting, is Postman Flows. So this feature recently GA’d this past March and basically Postman Flows is like a visual tool to basically build API-driven applications. So imagine creating documentation and getting your output from your APIs dynamically with Postman. So here I have an example where I have a collection where I can get the current weather. If I go about creating a flow with this, I have an example flow where I’m using that get request to get the current weather, and then I’m extracting the data from that request, so I’m visually extracting data such as the temperature, the time, and I’m also extracting another piece of data. And I can go ahead, when I click on run, I can basically get a dynamic dashboard of this flow at my fingertips.

So this is pretty interesting because it allows you to now do a lot more visualization with your API. So you can build something a little bit more controlled and you can get that data output very seamlessly. So let me show you an example where I’m basically, we can create a new flow together. So if I were to create a new flow, I can basically click on start and then I can send a request. So I have my stocks API. So if I wanted to get this stocks API, I can add my environment variable here that has my API key, I can select like a ticker for that API, and then if I wanted to run that request, I can look at the output dynamically here. So I have a visual way to view that output as I run that flow. And that allows me to build a little bit more deeper and get a little bit more deep dive into this API where I can basically get things like create logic about my API using like open and closed prices. It gets pretty detailed how you wanted to do this.

So I’ve seen people build some really interesting flows from interacting with their IoT devices to building automated systems where if you get, you know, if you wanted to send like 100 emails to your customers after they’ve subscribed to something, you can create those automated flows. So we have all of these flows within our flows collection. So if you’re interested in working with flows, you can take a look at all of the flows that we have available. So we have business flows, integration flows, NLP flows, utility flows, and these all are really interesting to work and play around with and you can create interesting dashboards and get creative with how you want to work with your APIs in a more dynamic and interesting way. So that is one of our newest features that has recently GA’d and we’re always looking for more contributors at Postman to create some interesting flows. So for those of you who have some cool public APIs that you want to, you know, create some interesting flows, you can always become a Postman Flows contributor as well. And then, finally, the last feature I wanted to talk about, which is often missed, I think it’s the last, I don’t think a lot of devs really love doing this, which is documentation.

So documentation is really interesting because you can write your documentation within Postman. So here, I have this collection. I can document this collection. Postman automatically takes each API that you create and sets its own documentation for it, but you can also set your own documentation here, you can set your overview, your authentication documentation. Is that me? Okay. You can create a lot of different types of documentation as well. And then if you were to create your own API, here I have an example where I have a customer API, I can create a new API and then use my definition file to design my API here. My documentation automatically gets updated as well as my API is being developed. So documentation is a huge feature, especially when it comes to not only consuming APIs, but creating APIs. And if you’re interested in exploring more APIs, you can always click on the explore tab and explore all the APIs that you have at your fingertips. And some of the best APIs have the best documentation. For example, our Salesforce APIs that are all the publicly available APIs, you can see that they have some of the best docs available by Salesforce creators. So if anyone has public APIs that they wanted to share, you could always publish your public APIs to the Postman public network and you can get much more visibility with Postman and forks of your public API.

So that’s basically the 10 features I wanted to dive into and I hope some of these features are new and features that you haven’t heard of. A couple more things before I end, we have a couple of early access to things like, for example, we have a VS Code extension that’s relatively new that should be launching. So you can now use Postman with VS Code, which is a little bit more seamless to work with Postman. And then the most interesting and new feature that is coming out that you can always get early access to is our post bot, which allows you to use AI to generate your Postman tests and create tests a little bit more seamlessly and dynamically by just asking Postman what you wanna test. So with that, I hope that you all found this talk interesting and you learn something new. We have a lot of additional resources. I run a program called “The Postman Intergalactic.” This is a webinar that we do monthly where we teach users about Postman, everything from designing, to testing, to developing APIs within Postman. And if you’re interested in learning more, feel free to follow me on Twitter @poojamakes, and, you know, scan the QR code and fork the collection to get started with some of these features today. Thank you, everyone.