Swagger is Now a Part of PayPal’s Future
On November 5th, the Linux Foundation announced a new collaborative project, the Open API Initiative. PayPal is proud to be one of the founding corporate members. This expands our relationship with the Linux Foundation and the open source world, as we are already members of the Node Foundation. This collaborative project establishes an open governance structure for moving the Swagger specification into the future, with corporate resources supporting the specification.
If you’ve followed Swagger’s story in recent years, you’ll know that in 2014, the project’s brand was bought by SmartBear (an API testing tool company, know for SOAPUI). As it turned out, this complicated things somewhat, from a trademark standpoint, for some adopters of Swagger’s open source standard.
The folks at SmartBear wanted to do the right thing for the Swagger open source community, so they’ve contributed the specification format to the Linux Foundation. The specification format will be referred to as the Open API Definition Format (OADF), which is essentially a brand-free synonym for Swagger.
PayPal was contacted by SmartBear and the Linux Foundation at the inception of the Open API Initiative. We had previously established a relationship with Swagger maintainers, as we’ve had numerous 2015 internal initiatives utilizing Swagger for API definitions. We were excited to join other leaders in the API space as part of the founding group of this collaborative project.
In discussions so far, it’s clear that all members involved are interested in supporting open source collaboration, and moving the Swagger specification forward without hindrance. The most exciting part is hearing that many member companies are planning to dedicate development resources toward contributing to Swagger open source projects.
PayPal, Braintree and Venmo are shifting more internal and external API initiatives and development resources toward utilizing Swagger, and we look forward to continuing to contribute to existing projects, and hopefully releasing some of our own.
PayPal has had a long-standing commitment to open source through our many iterations of APIs, including our latest REST APIs/SDKs and Braintree’s SDK. We understand that our SDKs don’t cover every language available, and that there are some great open source codegen products available for API clients, when a Swagger definition is provided.
We’re committed to delivering Swagger definitions for our APIs to our developer community in 2016, stay tuned for more information.
Author: Jason Harmon
About the author: Jason is the former head of the API Design team at PayPal, helping development teams design high quality, usable APIs across the platform. He blogs at apiux.com, and has a Youtube channel API Workshop (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKK2ir0jqCvfB-kzBGka_Lg).
