API playgrounds

API providers should develop and expose an associated website/developer portal, for developers to quickly get on board with their APIs. It serves the new clients with documentation, forums, and self-service provisioning with secure API access keys.

APP developers learning about APIs and their offerings, not only with documentation but also with straightforward tools and techniques in an environment in which they can test and manipulate data in a controlled, monitored way, is of paramount importance and brings massive interest among developers to learn and use the APIs.

An interactive and in-browser API playground is one of the best ways for potential users to identify the API endpoints and test their code to experience the API behavior.

Sandboxes, virtualization, and API playgrounds are three different ways that API providers can attract app developers to play with the API functionalities.

An API sandbox is a controlled environment in a limited area with specific rules and provides simple API calls. Virtualization is a mirror image of the real API and offers APP developers production-like environments to do more accurate testing. API playgrounds provide greater capabilities than the sandboxes, yet unlike virtualization, they come as a limited and controlled system emulation. API playgrounds are most suitable for developers to test and get more datasets out of the API; at the same time, the API providers also have better control of those environments.