The world has changed. I think everybody in 2020 😷 understood how important is to be information technology-friendly 🌐. Digital transformation for business is the key element to a successful business. If your business does not have API a lot of doors are closed to you. Of course, if you are a Software Developer with experience, making API for small business cases sounds a really easy task. But if we think about small businesses 💼: Confectionery, Farm, etc. To build API for them costs a lot, comparing the income they get. Are in the IT (Information Technology) marked any solutions that small businesses could use to make their API without programming skills? Let`s find out! 🔍
I know it sounds weird API-First (API - Application Programming Interfaces) without programming but it's not a distant future, but it's already the present. As Software Developers we have to find out other ways how to give chance to small businesses to be more technology friendly and spend much less money 💸 in making API.
Prerequisites 🔨
Tools we use for this experiment:
- Internet Browser that you use daily
- Postman - https://www.postman.com/downloads/ (if you are Tech guy)
Any solution?
IT market has a solution named Headless CMS (Headless Content Management Systems). In nutshell, Headless CMS is a tool where you build content consists of data, that automatically exposes as API.
A headless content management system, or headless CMS, is a back-end only content management system (CMS) built from the ground up as a content repository that makes content accessible via an API for display on any device.
The term “headless” comes from the concept of chopping the “head” (the front end, i.e. the website) off the “body” (the back end, i.e. the content repository).
Choose Headless CMS solution
The market has built a lot of Headless CMS solutions, each of them has different use-cases starting from on-premise and ending with cloud solutions. Before getting in touch with all solutions I defined the criteria to be met by the chosen solution.
My criteria of choose were:
- simplicity - the solution will understand anybody with fundamental computer skills
- easy to start - the solution does have simple UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interface), no necessary go through a bunch of wizards and configuration options
- hosted in the cloud - think when you have a small business, of course, you don`t have any self-hosted servers and skilled IT guys that support that
- available free plan - at the beginning, you build your business API it is really important to try that before spending real money
- simple and readable document
After experimenting with a bunch of solutions my preference goes to Hygraph. Hygraph has a really simple user experience and isn`t overstretched with tricky options. The solution is hosted in the cloud ☁️ and has a quite acceptable free plan for small business cases. That fits my predefined criteria quite well ✔️. In the end, Hygraph exposes data as Hygraph API. 🚀
Using free plan you get (https://hygraph.com/pricing):
- 5 users that can access your Hygraph project and work with content
- 2 languages you can translate your content into
- 5000 content entries across all your content models, such as a product, article, page, assets, etc
- 1 million API Calls per month
- 100 GB total bandwidth of assets you can query a month. Includes images, videos, documents, and other files
Enough information needs to dig into the real-life sample.
Make real-life sample for Bakery 🍰
The business case I choose is Bakery. The bakery has a small product range they would like to sell to the customer. For small businesses, there is an e-commerce platform 🏪 on the market. But to get into that platform you need to have API that platform would consume.
Tried to illustrate the business case how I see the solution ✏️. Bakery employee works only with user-friendly graphic interface. They define data structure and register products into Headless CMS (Hygraph) by using only a graphic interface. Hygraph exposes API all defined data structures in API endpoint that consumer could query data by using GraphQL queries.
Sign-Up and create a Bakery project
After a successful sign-up process ®️ you have to create the project by filling few details. In the project creation wizard choose a free plan that at starting phase we have not to pay anything. If you have any team members free plan allows you to add additional users to manage the project.
When you completely create a project you will see a quick start guide with four steps. If you complete the first three steps it would be enough. API integration details we leave to the e-commerce platform.
Define data structures 🗄️
To cover Bakery requirements we have to define two data structures Products and Category. The products data structure will store all available products Bakery makes. And category data structure will store groups of products: cakes, cookies, etc.
Using the Schema menu I have defined the following Bakery structures with fields.
Product model
Category model
It is important to notice that Hygraph has a feature that you can add any validation like required value, unique value, etc. simply check the appropriate checkbox 🗹.
Register Bakery products
The main job in making API we have already done. Now we have to fill in some data and give access to the API endpoint.
For each entry, you have two stages by default draft and published. At Bakery you can register products for the future in a draft state and publish them only when you are ready. Only published entries will be visible for API consumers.
For demonstration purposes, I have registered two categories and few products for each category.
Next, we try to query data from our API using Postman. 🔬
Consume Bakery API
Before we start to consume our Bakery API we have to configure access to that. In the Settings (API Access) section there are two options: "Public API"or "Permanent Auth Tokens". As we choose a free plan with few limitations I recommend choosing "Permanent Auth Tokens" 🔐 to avoid unwanted API requests. Public API options mean that everybody can access API without any security check. "Permanent Auth Tokens" options mean that you generate a unique API access token for each consumer they can use to access your data. Using a permanent authentication token you have full control over consumer accessing API. You can deny access to API at any time.
Generated token consumer puts to the Authorization request header. Decode token you can using https://jwt.io to look at the attributes token contains. Let`s try to query data from Bakery API using Postman.
If everything was configured correctly you have to get in response data. That`s it, now Bakery have API and they can manage data without any programming skills. 🎉
Of course, Hygraph has much more features than I described. If you would like to dive into more details check their documentation https://hygraph.com/docs.
Summary
As we saw in this post sometimes we do not need to write code to cover business needs related to API. Using Hygraph takes a short amount of time to make API for your business 💗. When your business has API it gives you a lot of opportunities: chatbots, e-commerce platforms, dynamic ads banners, etc. If you are interested in this topic and you are a tech guy then check Headless CMS Strapi.
Have fun in building API using Headless CMS! ⭐
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