Google API Console gets a cleanup

The developer front end for Google's APIs now has a sleeker, more productive interface

Google API Console gets a cleanup
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Google has revamped API Console, the central point of access for developers who want to make use of the APIs provided by Google's range of services.

The original, rather crowded interface has been replaced with "a better and more streamlined experience," Google said in its Developers Blog.

From the API Console, all of Google's APIs -- more than 100 across its different services -- can be searched by typing or browsing. For each API, there are links to both documentation and Google's APIs Explorer tool, along with dashboards showing usage and quotas.

overview Google Developers Blog

The revamped Google API Console makes it easier to search and connect to Google's welter of APIs and set up and manage authentication.

Google's other reason for revamping the API Console is to make it easier to step through the tasks typically associated with connecting to and using an API. Any needed credentials, for instance, can be set up and connected to the API using a wizard available in the API Console.

The Google APIs Explorer tool itself hasn't changed -- it still sports the same UI design as previous generation of Google services -- but it provides ways to try out an API's method calls directly in the browser, as well as view your request history for APIs and see the different versions of the API that are available.

Google has also expanded the ways for plugging into and putting to use its trove of APIs. The cloud giant recently added the AWS Lambda-like Google Cloud Functions to its roster of cloud platform development services to write "serverless" applications where snippets of code are triggered by HTTP requests or other events. Snippets are one option to aggregate Google's APIs, as they provide an easy way to compose connections between APIs and coordinate responses from across them.

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