Integrating with Interswitch APIs is easier than ever. Time to give it a try!
Edidiong Asikpo | Software Engineer, Developer Relations
Have you been curious about Interswitch APIs but worried it’s too complicated to use? Good news: Integrating with Interswitch APIs is easier than ever.
You probably know about one or two Interswitch APIs, but for some reason, you haven’t used them. It could either be the documentation, integration, the old developer console, or everything else that made it seem too confusing to be worth the effort.
In truth, integrating with Interswitch APIs have been relatively complex for years now, largely because of the complexity of our APIs, lack of well-defined documentation, poor developer experience, and support. But in 2020 a slew of new offerings and updates vastly expanded our APIs, making 2020 the year to finally integrate to Interswitch APIs.
So, what’s new?
All Interswitch APIs are now HTTP-based RESTful APIs, therefore, API requests and response formats are in JSON. Authentication credentials such as the client ID and secret key can now be gotten on the Developer Console after which, you can carry out end-to-end tests on all our APIs without reaching out to anyone in our support team for approval. Users are no longer limited to sending requests via our custom InterswitchAuth realm because we’ve also added an option for using the OAuth 2.0 authorization framework.
Our documentation has been improved, updated, and tested by members of the developer ecosystem in Nigeria. This time, we listened to the Voice-of-the Developer community ensuring the implementation of their feedback. Of course, we recognize that feedback is a continuous journey which is why we have incorporated community engagement in the new developer portal.
How would these updates impact you positively?
Everything we did was specifically to address the issues that have been raised by Developers over the years about our APIs.
Developer Console
Unlike the old Developer Console that was outdated and difficult for developers to use. The new Developer Console provides self-service integration, giving you the ability to access Interswitch product APIs, authentication parameters, Sandbox keys, production keys, documentation, and seamless project management.
If you care about the details of the new design, and the design decision that went into it, we have it documented here.
Documentation
We realized that most developers believe our API documentation is only available via pdf but that isn’t true. Even though we did that at some point, our API documentation was moved to a docbase a few years ago.
However, we acknowledge that the reason why most people were not aware of this improvement was caused by one of two things:
- The people who integrated with our APIs when we sent pdf as documents discontinued the use of our APIs after their first try.
- We didn’t create effective awareness around the documentation.
Sadly, the people who knew about the existence of the Interswitch docbase were still not satisfied with it based on the survey we carried out. The issues were addressed by creating a team and implementing the Human-Centered Design research method to ensure that the information on our API documentation is valuable for developers and businesses who intend to integrate with our APIs.
After we benchmarked our API documentation against renowned companies, we updated, standardized, and improved its UI/UX to enable easy navigation of the documentation.
If you would love to read about the new designs and updates, we made to our API documentation, click here.
Authorization
Interswitch APIs would now be authenticated through the OAuth2 bearer realm meaning that it is no longer compulsory to use our custom InterswitchAuth Realm. This will eliminate the difficulties attached to the old InterswitchAuth and ensure that you can quickly and easily authenticate every API call you make.
OAuth2 completely decouples the server from the client (Developer Console) as the server doesn’t have to know about the email or login details provided in the client.
Developer Forum
We created a forum to build a close-knit community of developers integrating with our APIs and using any of our products. Feel free to join the forum.
Conclusion
Indeed, Interswitch APIs enable you to create powerful tools and products. Ready to give Interswitch APIs a try? Visit the new Developer Console and get started.
