OpenAPI : Fostering a vendor-neutral ecosystem of APIs
The Open API Initiative (OAI) was created by a consortium of forward-looking industry experts who recognize the immense value of standardizing on how REST APIs are described. As an open governance structure under the Linux Foundation, the OAI is focused on creating, evolving and promoting a vendor neutral description format.
Currently, OpenAPI has gained traction involving a growing number of companies and research centers in order to collaborate in its activities and the creation of a tooling ecosystem to help developers and architects.
This article summarizes the main parts of the presentation at ICSOC17 with links of the screen-casts of the key parts in the talk. During the presentation we covered why this Initiative is interesting (Benefits), which is the current status of the OpenAPI Specification (OASv3), what is the ecosystem of Tooling available and , finally we present a technical Hands-On that shows the benefits of using OAS in real developments. The full talk (57m) is available in this link.
Benefits
With the consolidation of Micro-services architectures REST APIs are becoming the cornerstone that drive the integration and evolution on most infrastructures. In the following short video fragment (~7m) we present an introduction of these architectures and the REST Paradigm to identify why an standard specification can help.
OpenAPI Specification v3
The main goal of OAI is the development of an standard way of specifying a REST API; specifically, the key outcome of the initiative is the OpenAPI Specification (OAS) that is currently under its version 3 (as Dec. 2017). In the following short video fragment (~7m) we review the main elements of the specification showing simple examples and identify the new features introduced in the last version.
Tooling Ecosystem
One of the most important benefits of OAI is the growing ecosystem of tools build by the community that help in different parts of the API development lifecycle: from modelling or documenting to the testing. In the following short video fragment (~5m) we review the different kinds of tools and some examples of them.
Hands-on: From 0 to API with OpenAPI
In order to see the Open API Specification in action, in this hands-on (~20m), we present a concrete example where we build from scratch a fully-working API in few minutes. Specifically, we present how we can generate a complete API scaffolding in NodeJS (using Swagger Editor), how we can document it (with Swagger UI ) and test it (usig oatts).
Pablo Fernandez is a Researcher at ISA Group in the University of Sevilla, contact him at (pablofm at us.es)
