I recently completed a small project for Zenstores. They simplify the shipping process for ecommerce sites. Their online service lets online businesses use multiple shipping companies for deliveries.

Each shipping companies offers a different own API, for booking shipments, etc. My client uses a separate microservice for each shipping company. These microservices listen to requests from the main system and translate them to the shipping company’s standard.

My client asked me to use Django Rest Framework to create a microservice which supports a new shipping company. DRF is a popular and powerful library to create RESTful APIs using Django.

The supplier provided me with a sandbox API and extensive documentation. The documentation was somewhat incomplete and out of date. Fortunately their support contact was very helpful all along.

I used Test Driven Design for complex functions where I understood the functionality well. For the rest I used a more experimental approach and added unit tests afterwards. Testing coverage was over 90%.

The client has integrated the microservice within their system and the first test shipments have gone through.