Nearly every major application on the market today owes its existence to the prevalence of free software and libraries, created and shared for no reason other than to move the industry forward. Skyward Apps is constantly looking for ways to give back and contribute to the public good, and out of this drive came Popcorn.

API data sets are often built upon multiple calls to multiple API endpoints. To get the full information on a student from a student database, for example, you might have to query the “/api/students” endpoint to get a list of students, then the “/api/students/directory” endpoint to get their phone numbers, and so on. This introduces a large amount of code overhead, as well as wasted bandwidth if each endpoint returns data you don’t care about.

The solution is Skyward’s Popcorn API Helper, an API middleware application that runs on top of and enhances an existing API. It provides a very specific value: it reduces the burden on your web server while increasing the flexibility of the browser. Your website or application can make fewer calls, use less bandwidth and get data faster.

Skyward uses this library internally to optimize our own development solutions for clients. We have open-sourced the library, along with extensive examples and documentation, to allow any other development team to benefit from it.

Selective inclusion from a RESTful API
• Configurable responses
• Sorting of responses
• Selective authorization and permissioning of response values

To date, Popcorn has been downloaded more than 23,000 times on Github.