API Development

Insomnia38.2k★

If you build or test APIs, Insomnia is a desktop app where you craft HTTP requests, see responses, and organize everything into collections. Think of it as a workbench for talking to APIs — REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and WebSockets all in one interface. You build a request (set the URL, headers, body), hit send, and see the response with syntax highlighting and formatting. Environment variables let you switch between dev/staging/production with one click. Collections keep your API endpoints organized by project. Insomnia went through a rough patch — Kong (the company) added mandatory cloud sync and login requirements, then walked it back after community backlash. The current state: you can use Insomnia locally without an account (Scratch Pad mode), but collaboration features require Kong's cloud. Free tier includes basic request building and local storage. Paid tiers ($5-12/user/mo) add team sync, Git integration, and AI features. The catch: the trust damage from the forced cloud login hasn't fully healed. Bruno — an open source API client that stores collections as plain files in your git repo — emerged directly because of Insomnia's missteps. If you want an API client that will never require a login or cloud sync, Bruno is the answer. Insomnia is more polished and feature-rich, but the community's trust is conditional.

api-gateway578★

If you need to put something in front of your APIs that handles rate limiting, authentication, request transformation, and routing — an API gateway — Membrane is a lightweight Java-based option. It sits between your clients and your backend services, inspecting and modifying requests as they flow through. Think of it as a bouncer and translator for your API. It can check authentication, throttle abusive clients, rewrite URLs, transform XML to JSON, and route traffic to different backends based on rules. The configuration is XML-based (this is a Java project, after all). Membrane has been around since 2011 and is open source under Apache 2.0. It's a niche tool with a small but committed community (578 stars). No paid tier, no cloud service. The catch: this is old-school Java middleware. If you're in a modern cloud-native stack, Traefik or Kong are better choices — they have larger communities, better documentation, and integration with Kubernetes. Membrane works but it feels like enterprise software from a different era. The XML configuration is verbose. The documentation assumes Java familiarity. Unless you have a specific need for Membrane's SOAP/WSDL handling (it's strong there) or you're already in a Java shop, there are better options.