Apigee

[Nacho]

Hi I am looking for feedback about your experiences using Apigee. 

Are there any knowledge that developers should have before hand? Which training do you consider useful to take? 

Are there any consideration to take before starting using or developing for it?

Any good / bad practice to share?

Thanks in advance,

Ignacio

[Andrei Neculau]

Slightly a rant, but regarding only the narrow-scope of the Apigee Console functionality... let's just say that they convinced me of forking the open-source wordnik's swagger and work on that.

I have no idea how their other services behave, but I've chewed on enough dog food.

[Kern Patton]

Andrei I am curious to hear the specifics on how you think the Apigee Console falls short? I am a big fan of what Tony and crew have put together with Swagger and I have incorporated it into my api platform and created a .NET library for using it. I am currently incorporating the Apigee WADL spec into my platform as well and am very interested in getting your perspective. 

thanks

Kern

[Andrei Neculau]

Kern,

one of the specifics

http://support.apigee.com/apigee/topics/element_payload_http_api_apigee_com_wadl_2010_07_with_element_only_content_type_cannot_have_text_content

multiply that by 10 or more cases that got solved by trial&error,

and you understand where I'm coming from.

Last but not least, I find it it totally wrong to be contacted in private to be asked why am I frustrated.

Why not on this group, or on that forum, wherever they picked up that I am "frustrated" ? Did anyone/they look at their support forum? I see ~10 reasons to be frustrated just on the link I've sent.

When they figure out how an episode like that, but also plenty of others in their forum, can be handled properly and up to par with their long lasting experience, then they can try something else.

I finish by saying that in all due honesty Apigee is not just Apigee Console.

I believe the Console is their most visible product, but I could be very very wrong.

Good luck with your WADL schema (be aware that it is more of an Apigee schema that looks like WADL) and uploading it to Apigee Console.

Do share your experience. It could be that I have too much Latin blood and that I'm terribly unlucky =)

[Marsh Gardiner]

Hi Andrei, 

While WADL is a pretty good description language for APIs, we have learned a lot about where it falls short over the last 2+ years that we have been using it at Apigee. Where we can, we've tried to extend it thoughtfully by adding our own namespaced elements. Unfortunately, it appears that you ran into two issues: 

1. A recent change to the payload element had not been properly documented
   
2. A bug in how our parser handled CDATA in the payload element
   

If that had happened to me, I'd be frustrated, too. Both of those issues are part of our next release, which should go into production on Tuesday because of your feedback. 

Lastly, it has been my experience that anyone who is so vocal about a frustrating experience has other insights to offer. My private invitation was because I hoped to learn more by talking directly to you. I apologize for having offended you in any way.

Thanks,

Marsh

[Kern Patton]

Andrei,

Reading Marsh's response it doesn't look like you are unlucky, just maybe ahead of the curve. I am hoping we get an update from Marsh once the new release is in place so we can all test away. 

Up until this point I have only used the console to "play" with the available APIs, which I found is really good for doing that. It made learning some of the bigger APIs much easier. I am attempting to build the Apigee wadl into my API platform www.apidude.com which on one hand isn't hard but on the other is a little daunting (very little experience with WADL in general) and my solution already supports Swagger. Which is a really nice and I like it a lot but being able to get into the Apigee console would be a good step.

On the other frustrating point, I am sure the apigee team felt the need to go directly to you to get a full disclosure response on your issues and how to best resolve them. As someone who has rolled software out to users the last thing you want is a user to run into an issue and you want to get to that person as soon as possible to find the pain points and find a resolution. it looks like your issues pointed out an issue in their software and they responded with a release, which is impressive since I am guessing that took a bit of work to get fixed. So lets test out the release when it happens and see if the issue is resolved. 

 

Thanks

Kern