OpenAPI

OpenAPI (formerly known as "Swagger") brings significant benefits to REST API development and usage:

Reduced development time

• OpenAPI auto-generates interactive documentation. API documentation is crucial for developers to understand how to interact with API endpoints, and before OpenAPI, API documentation was rarely comprehensive and a chore to update (ie docs were often out of date). With auto-generated documentation, these problems simply go away.
• OpenAPI makes it easy to create SDKs (integration starter libraries) for multiple programming languages. A big challenge that API companies face is providing client libraries for multiple languages and frameworks: Node.js, C#, Python, Ruby, Java, PHP, etc. OpenAPI code generation tools allow us to create API libraries for different programming languages with far less work. This brings cost and time savings both when we are developing an API for you, and when we are integrating with a third-party API that has an OpenAPI definition.

Increased robustness

• Therefore there's less room for error. An API's "OpenAPI description" file defines the rules for the API. The documentation and libraries are derived directly from this file. This means the docs and the code can't get out of sync – they are derived from the same single source so when the API is updated, the docs are too, and new SDKs can be auto-generated.

To discuss how we can use OpenAPI to benefit your company, contact us.