Strongly typed third-party integrations with TypeScript

Many of us have to integrate third-party APIs, and we cannot trust their documentation. We also need to track when their data format changes. The same is true for integrating our own (or other teams’) microservices. I will show how we do this in an effective and flexible way using TypeScript.

In this talk, I will present my approach to doing this safely with TypeScript and how this enables end-to-end contract testing which I have been using for many years and consider one of the robust best practices we apply basically in all of our web application projects.

This is a very practical, hands-on talk with many concrete examples that will give the audience a clear guide on how to build robust, well documented system integrations.

We leverage NPM modules to version our API definition and create a clear source of truth for all your integrations, be it a REST API, WebSocket or CoAP messages-the same principle applies.

The three key-takeaways are:

• learn about TypeBox (https://github.com/sinclairzx81/typebox) and how I use it to make integrations of third-party APIs type-safe

• see a code-example where a frontend-application runs against a mock-API using these types

• get to know techniques to discover breaking API changes through monitoring