Larry Kluger

Biography

Larry Kluger is the Lead Developer Advocate for DocuSign. He has many years of tech industry experience as a software developer, product manager, and developer advocate. An award-winning speaker, he enjoys giving talks and meeting members of the developer community.

Talk description

All successful APIs have one thing in common: users. And users need tools, including an API Explorer. Join us to learn how to use the Google Blockly library to create an easy to use graphical block-oriented API Explorer that works well with any API, including those with deeply-nested API objects.

API Explorers typically use a form with many drop-down fields to enable different API request options to be chosen and then tried. But for the many APIs that enable requests to include multiple levels of nested objects and arrays, the common API Explorer model breaks down due to the complexity of specifying and displaying the many API objects and their sub-objects, sub-sub-objects, etc.

In this talk, we’ll discuss and demonstrate a solution: using the open source Google Blockly library to create a graphical API Explorer which can cleanly support APIs with any number of nested objects and arrays. The Gang of Four Builder pattern is also used, enabling the API’s complex model to be expressed as an array of simple SDK requests.

The result is an easy to use graphical drag and drop tool for creating and trying complex API requests.