This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Beppe Catanese
APIs evolve quickly with new features, design changes, and deprecations, making it challenging for consumers to keep up. This impact can be significant: developers might miss valuable improvements, misunderstand the behavior of new features, delay the adoption of critical compliance updates.
This is why we have put passion and effort in the Adyen API Diff Tool, a new tool designed to help developers and technical users easily track and compare changes between API versions.
Whether you’re maintaining an existing integration or building something new, staying on top of API changes is critical. Previously, this information was scattered across various sources like product announcements, documentation, release notes, and GitHub, resulting in a suboptimal user experience.
This changes today with our new powerful API Diff Tool.
Features
Our goal is simple: to make it easy to understand what’s changed in the Adyen APIs between any two versions.
The Diff Tool includes built-in filters to:
Compare API versions
View changes by version, endpoint and HTTP method
Group changes by endpoint
Spot quickly what’s new, changed, or removed
Focus on Breaking Changes only
Labels, colors, and accordions provide a clean and effective way to visualize the changes. It is embedded directly in the API Explorer. From any specific change in the log, you can easily navigate to the relevant API reference or endpoint details.
Benefits for Developers and other Users
The API Diff Tool is designed to remove uncertainty when working with Adyen APIs. Whether you’re integrating for the first time or upgrading to a new version, it is a valuable tool to:
Understand what changed**: compare any two API versions and see exactly what’s been added, removed, or modified.
Spot breaking changes early**: identify changes that could impact your integration, so you can plan ahead.
Evolve faster and safer**: stay up-to-date with the latest API releases to integrate the new products and features available.
Find what you need more quickly**: go to the API Explorer to find the API reference, the Diff Tool, a lot of examples and code snippets. Everything you need is in one place.
Acknowledgments and Credits
This initiative was a true cross-team effort involving Technical Writers, Developer Relations, and API Champions. We’ve put significant thought and effort into delivering on our promise of a best-in-class Developer Experience.
A special thank you goes to the open-source project OASDiff, which powers the engine behind our Diff Tool. It enables detailed comparisons between OpenAPI specification files, detects breaking changes, and generates change diffs in multiple formats.
Next Steps: Collect Feedback and Iterate
The API Diff Tool helps developers and integration partners manage API updates more efficiently. It simplifies upgrading to the latest API version, troubleshooting issues, and planning new integrations. By making API changes more transparent, this tool reduces friction and effort during the integration journey, ultimately enhancing the developer experience and accelerating new API adoption.
In the next iteration we will be looking at adding support for webhooks and the option to subscribe to changes.
The Adyen API Diff Tool is now available in our API Explorer! Try it out and share your feedback. We look forward to your input to continue improving.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Beppe Catanese