Today we’re launching the Streamr API Explorer as part of our ongoing drive to improve the developer experience on the Streamr platform. The Explorer is an interactive dashboard to query our RESTful API directly inside the browser. You’ll be able to test and experiment with Streamr Canvases, data streams, dashboards and Marketplace products and much more.

Explorer Features:

Test any Streamr Restful API endpoint live in the browser

Straightforward authentication with your API key

Generate SDK code in different languages

Code examples

Built-in HTTP reference table

Light/Dark themes

Watch Matthew Fontana give a quick overview of the new API explorer

Why we chose OAX — The Open Application Explorer

What is truly wonderful about the open source community is that everyday we get to stand on the shoulders of giants. Today our giant was Jan Forst who built an open source project called the Open Application Explorer (OAX). Out of the many open source options we evaluated, OAX was judged by our design team to have the best UX . While it may have been convenient to have built on commercially licensed software, that would goes against our mission to live decentralised. We forked OAX and adapted it to our environment to achieve full coverage of our API.

OAX was built using the Vue framework, whereas our Marketplace is built with its friendly rival, React. Vue is more of an opinionated language whereas React is perhaps more verbose, albeit more predictable to develop with. Overall, it took about two weeks to integrate and adapt OAX to our needs which is a fraction of what it could have taken had we started from scratch.

OAX works by parsing Streamr’s OpenAPI Specification definition file. The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) defines a standard programming language-agnostic interface description for REST APIs, which allows both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of a service without requiring access to source code, additional documentation, or inspection of network traffic.

We hope this serves as a handy resource for developers building great apps/dApps on top of the Streamr Platform!