Webflow’s mission is to bring development superpowers to everyone.
In August 2023 we shipped our first ever Designer APIs that enabled developers to interact with the Webflow Designer. Developers immediately started creating powerful Apps to enable Webflow users to build faster and more feature-rich sites. With the launch of these APIs, the feature requests started rolling in to build new functionality and we realized that in order to harness the full power of the Designer we would need to take a different approach to how we architect our APIs. With this re-architecture (V2) came some performance challenges that were resolved with a multi-faceted approach to the problem.
Designer API V1 vs V2
As discussed in part 1, the current Designer APIs (V2) are designed to enable immediate communication with our internal application logic for each API request, a capability that was not available with our V1 APIs. Below is an example demonstrating how you would write the same code for both V1 and V2: