Restlet

Democratising REST APIs

I was the 6th employee to Restlet at a time when the API management market was in full throttle.

Restlet developped 3 main products:

  • Restlet Cloud: a PaaS for APIs, that could host data, or connect to external data sources, and expose them as APIs on the internet. Fully SaaS.
  • Restlet Client: an API testing tool, strong competitor to Postman back in the day
  • Restlet Studio: an API design and documentation tool

My biggest contributions were on Restlet Studio as a product owner / manager.

Restlet Studio made editing YAML-based Swagger/OAS files much more accessible and productive

API definitions are the communication nexus for you frontend and backend teams, for your API consumers and producers — both inside and outside your company. They are a central element of your API strategy. But authoring good API definitions can be challenging, as you need to know all the details of the underlying specifications.

At Restlet, we launched Restlet Studio, a visual editor for OpenAPI Specifications, or OAS for short (formerly known as the Swagger Specification), to ease the authoring of your API contract, as well as to help you get started quickly with client SDK and server skeleton code generation, API documentation, and for translating from other API formats into OAS.

Once you designed your API, you got SDK generation, documentation, and testing basically without any extra effort.

So long as it hasn’t been removed, you might be able to see the original video I made, including my voice-over, on Vimeo.