Box API Navigator

Box API Navigator

An interactive tool for learning the Box API

1 follower

Box API Navigator gallery image
Box API Navigator gallery image
Launch tags:
APIDeveloper ToolsTech
Launch Team

What do you think? …

Mike Schwartz
Hey Product Hunters - we're really excited to share this new tool! Box’s API provides a number of different capabilities to handle files in an application. From uploading a file to displaying a file to searching for files, different endpoints of our API can be chained together to power a file component of any application. But sometimes, it can be hard to understand how these different endpoints fit together and how they might help you in an application you’re building. Today, we're excited to introduce a new tool for developers called API Navigator. API Navigator is a web application that allows you to explore how Box Platform can be integrated into an application using our APIs. You can read an introduction to API Navigator here: https://docs.box.com/v2.0/blog/i... We've also made a ton of updates to our developer experience and you can read more about this here: https://blog.box.com/blog/box-de... Let me know if you have any questions!
Ilya M
@_mikeschwartz top level dev-experience Just wonder if you have a dedicated team for that product Keep it up!
Mike Schwartz
@matveyich we do! We have a whole team that solely focuses on developer tools. API Navigator was built by a team at Box who builds demos for customers. We've now productized this and will continue to look at how to improve it - maybe even open source it.
Mike Schwartz
A lot of folks have been mentioning the move from static to interactive documentation. We recently enabled a bunch of new features to our docs, created by our documentation platform, Readme.io. If you haven't heard of Readme, check them out. You can also explore our new docs site here: https://docs.box.com
Nicolas Grenié
Well done Box API team! :) This is a new example on developer experience. Stripe is taking a similar path with integrating Runkit (https://runkit.com) examples in their API documentation. After static documentation came interactive documentation generated by API description format like Swagger or RAML. We also had companies like Readme.io trying to provide a "standard" layout for API documentation. I think now it's the time for interactive/dynamic examples like this one. But I really wonder how this tool could be maintain in the back, is it easy to add a new feature/endpoint? Are you using anything like Swagger? Plan to opensource your tool?
Mike Schwartz
@picsoung hey Nicolas- great questions. We're looking into a swagger spec now and have a really good relationship with Readme.io, so perhaps we can work with them by defining a standard for API Navigators. As I mentioned in the comment above, this was an internal tool developed by a few folks at Box that we decided to open up. The feedback has been really positive so far!
Alessandra Pereyra
@picsoung Not *that* related (sadly :) ) but I think that what you mention is what we're trying to accomplish at CodePicnic (https://codepicnic.com/docs) to move from static documentation towards real code users can actually work with, play around (and obviously, mess up!).
Ted Blosser
awesome upgrade!! Can't wait to use it to test our Box APIs much more quickly.
Mike Schwartz
@ted_blosser thanks for the comment, Ted! You should check out our docs, too. The folks at Readme.io have introduced a ton of new features! Thanks for setting us up with them!
Ted Blosser
@_mikeschwartz @gkoberger has the best product on the market! Glad to know that Box is truly taking a developer-first approach in everything it builds.
Patrick Poulin
@ted_blosser @_mikeschwartz @gkoberger One more ping for the team at Readme. @gkoberger is always helpful and generous with his time!