Here at HubSpot, we're serious about making our platform as frictionless as possible for developers to build powerful apps and integrations. That’s why our Developer Experience team has been hard at work on our next generation of APIs, which are designed to be clean and consistent across all endpoints.
We wanted to share some of the progress we've made on this front, as well as some best practices on leveraging our APIs, so on July 14 we hosted a virtual workshop for our developer community. Below you can find a recording of the event, a recap of what we covered, and a list of resources referenced by our speakers. We also took a shot at answering a few of the many questions we didn't get to address during the live Q&A session.
Check out the recording and read on to learn about our next generation of APIs!
Workshop Recap
Developer Resource Updates
We kicked off the event with a review of some recent updates and additions we've made to our developer resources. This included mentions of our new website, updated documentation, Postman collections, client libraries (PHP, Python, Ruby, Node.js), Academy developer courses, changelog, and of course this developer blog.
Refreshed APIs
To kick off the API workshop, at 05:59, Francis Ndicu, a Product Lead on our API Tooling team, walks us through the history behind HubSpot's APIs and what led to a company wide initiative to improve their experience. Francis shares some of the API consistency challenges we've had, and how the old APIs compare with the latest versions.
At 08:42, Chris Baldauf from our Developer Experience team, walks through an example showcasing how to pull contacts, companies, deals and tickets from HubSpot's APIs into a CSV. He then walks through some of our API formatting updates, the addition of default object properties, how we've addressed lists and pagination, and the addition of actions and batch operations. At 18:06, Chris moves on to archiving and the object lifecycle within HubSpot, and then covers changes we've made for easier error handling. He wraps up by sharing some of the things that have not changed about our APIs, and some changes to come.
At 22:40, Francis returns to tell the story of how we approached these API changes, starting with a look at HubSpot's API design guide. He then reviews our new API catalog, powered by Swagger. Francis wraps up by reviewing some of the other measures we've put in place internally to ensure compliance with our API standards.
The Future of the App Ecosystem
At 26:41, Tricia Chang, Product Lead for HubSpot's Ecosystem, shares HubSpot's vision for the future of the platform, and the opportunity at hand. She also provides some compelling industry data and inspiration for dreaming up the next great HubSpot integration.
Q&A Question Followup
Our audience asked many great questions, but due to time constraints we were only able to answer about 20 during the live broadcast. We've pooled together the most frequently asked questions into some broad responses and resources below.
HubDB
Some of you were curious about HubDB, HubSpot's own relational data store represented as rows, columns, and cells in a table, much like a spreadsheet.
You can create a HubDB table directly from the UI or you can create and query data externally via the HubDB API. You can even use HubSpot’s HubL markup tags to pull data into the CMS. By coupling the HubDB API with serverless functions, you can provide an interactive web app experience like creating an event registration app, building dynamic team member pages and using HubDB to add video or maps to dynamic pages.
SDKs & Code Samples
We had a lot of SDK and code sample requests come up during this session! We've already added a post to our developer community forum based on your .NET SDK requests (don't forget to upvote!), but please create a new post for anything else you'd like our team to consider.
CRM Search API
Earlier this year we launched the CRM search API which makes getting data from HubSpot more efficient by allowing developers to filter, sort, and search across any CRM object type, including contacts, deals, companies, and tickets.
If you'd like to see additional functionality added to this API, you can upvote community posts like this one, or create a new post of your own!
Developer Support Resources
For the questions we weren't able to address, here are a few of the ways you can reach out for more information, or stay up to date on future updates:
Subscribe to the changelog for notifications on new APIs getting released into developer preview or general release, updates to existing APIs, APIs being deprecated, and more.
Ask questions, connect and learn from other developers on the API & Integrations, CMS, and Share Your Work boards.
When's the Next Developer Event?
We're cooking up all kinds of ideas for future developer events, and you can expect us to ramp them up soon. Follow our Google Calendar to stay on top of events as we add them, and be sure to sign up for our developer newsletter for the latest events and resources. See you at the next event!
