Introducing Postman Public Workspaces: The First Massively Multiplayer API Experience
We’ve been constantly improving the Postman platform based on user feedback since day one. Originally, it was a simple API testing tool, but soon many users were requesting more and more collaboration capabilities, and so we built and released them as fast as we could. And the platform now has more than 17 million developers across 500,000 organizations collaborating in many different ways.
Today, we’re proud to announce that we are taking collaboration on APIs to a totally new level: Introducing Postman public workspaces, now in beta.
The first massively multiplayer API experience
Postman workspaces are a popular feature that enables developers to share Postman components with collaborators and organize their API work. Prior to today, these Postman workspaces have been confined only to the boundaries of a team; there was no ability to collaborate with external stakeholders or organizations.
And, as they have done since day one, our fantastic Postman community has pushed us to reimagine those abilities.
With public workspaces, we are crossing this barrier for the first time and taking collaboration on APIs beyond the realm of a team. Now, people from different teams, different companies—virtually anyone, really—can communicate and work together to build software in a way that was never possible before.
In massively multiplayer games, a large community of gamers unites to play or join a quest. When the ability to play at a massively multiplayer level first appeared, it changed gaming forever.
Similarly, Postman’s public workspaces will let a massive community of users engage with APIs or collections organized by API producers, with the ultimate quest of improving every API and the experience of that API’s consumers. This massively multiplayer capability will improve and broaden the experience for all Postman users; while most users take advantage of Postman’s ability to send requests, there’s so much more that they can do with APIs. With the massive scale of public workspaces, the ability to search, discover, and work with APIs will rise exponentially for everyone as more and more people participate.
And the concept of public workspaces is really even broader than that. Workspaces don’t have to be about an API or a company. They can be topical or based on interests, entertainment, culture, science, or anything else that people can dream up (check out the US 2020 Election public workspace as one example). We believe the possibilities here are genuinely endless.
Need a quick overview of what Postman public workspaces can do for you? Watch this 30-second intro:
Postman’s own public workspace
We were so excited about this feature that we couldn’t wait to create our own public workspace. So we did, and it’s ready for you to dive in.
The Postman public workspace has our Postman API and a variety of collections that enable developers, engineers, architects, testers, product managers, and other API consumers to accomplish a lot of their workflows programmatically. The potential uses include automation, integration, API governance, lifecycle management, securing credentials, and spotting leakages.
Here are the ten collections that we’ve plugged into our public workspace to begin with:
- Postman API: This collection acts as the definitive source of truth for all things Postman API. It provides a reference to the entire spectrum of our API, making it possible to carry out actions you would normally do within the Postman app, automatically through Postman collections or scripts.
- API Lifecycle: Among other things, APIs can reduce the burden of manual tasks. This collection showcases how the entire API lifecycle can be produced, updated, and consumed via automated calls to the Postman API. You can run this collection in full, or digest chunks of the collection to automate a select few stages of the lifecycle.
- API Usage: This collection provides administrators, or anyone interested in Postman usage patterns, insight into feature utilizations. Scripts test against usage limits, which can be used in combination with Postman Monitors and our monitoring integrations to alert you as to when your team is approaching its limits. It is combined with built-in visualizations making it far easier to make sense of this data.
- Environment Scanner: APIs inevitably require credentials. In Postman, those credentials should be stored in managed environments. Nevertheless, it’s often necessary to evaluate environments for compliance reasons. Using the Postman API, this collection provides an efficient, automated way to check all environments within a team, ensuring data is held appropriately and not leaked.
- Governance – Design: As the number of APIs that your team works on grows, it becomes challenging to maintain design consistency across all the APIs. This collection demonstrates how the Postman API can be used to govern collections, schemas, and more, checking that they meet your design conventions in an automated fashion.
- Governance – Full Lifecycle: Most organizations can apply governance to the design stage of the API lifecycle. Organizations further down the line can evaluate the entire lifecycle. This collection provides a blueprint for applying full-lifecycle governance through Postman.
- Postman to JMeter: If you use JMeter to load test functional behavior and measure performance, you’ll know all about JMeter test plans. This collection allows you to automatically create a JMeter test plan based on a given collection. Simply plug in your API keys and you’ll be ready to run in minutes.
- Team Transfer: Postman has an incredibly powerful runtime which allows for the sequencing of requests. A collection containing just a few request definitions can be advanced to a stage where running the collection executes hundreds or even thousands of requests. This type of branching and looping is demonstrated perfectly in this application against the Postman API, illustrating how Postman assets can be moved between teams—a highly useful tool for team administrators.
- Tools that use Postman API: It isn’t just collections that can harness the power of the Postman API. Indeed, the Postman API can be consumed in multiple ways, including from the command line. For those looking to try Postman tools beyond just the app, this collection can be used to find those tools and a little bit about what they do.
- Update Schema from VCS: Postman’s API Builder contains two-way sync for schemas with GitHub. This means you can easily create and validate Postman assets using the latest version of your schema. If you aren’t using GitHub, use this collection with Newman and your VCS and CI tools of choice to enjoy the same level of integration.
We’re ready for you to take the public workspaces beta for a test-drive
We encourage you to browse the Postman public workspace discussed above and keep an eye out for more public workspaces to come on the Postman API Network, and then let us know if you have ideas or improvements by creating an issue on our GitHub page.
For a deeper dive, please join us for the “Introducing Postman Public Workspaces: The First Massively Multiplayer API Experience” webinar on December 2 to see a full demo of public workspaces and participate in a live Q&A.
Want to take a deeper dive into Postman public workspaces? Read about the history behind them and what you can do with them in our companion blog post here.
How do I join a public workspace? I noticed that clicking the “Import” button opens a window which contains a “Join this workspace” button. However, when I click that button the window closes an I see no indication that I have, in fact, joined the workspace. I tried it on both the “US 2020 Election” and “Postman Public Workspace” workspaces.
Hey Mark, good catch! We’ve disabled the Import button for unjoined workspaces. You shouldn’t be able to join a public workspace that doesn’t belong to your team for now.
an expert.
I am signing up because I had heard I may need this app. by an expert. Need more training later
There are situations where a company might want to publish a collection to produce API Reference Doc for customers, but said company wants the URL to that API doc to be private and un-searchable. In other words, like an “unlisted” YouTube video, a company might want only customers who know the URL to have access to the API Reference Doc.
This is the state of my company and our Customer API Reference we’ve published via one special Postman collection in an isolated workspace. We don’t want our competitors to be able to easily search/browse and examine how our APIs work.
So: will the new changes enable us to keep our collection “unlisted” in this way and therefore un-searchable and NOT listed in some public directory? If so, how, exactly? If not, then it’s important that your product managers take the above comments and scenario seriously!