Swagger (OpenAPI) is a language-agnostic specification for describing REST APIs. It allows both computers and humans to understand the capabilities of a REST API without direct access to the source code.
The Swagger project was donated to the OpenAPI Initiative in 2015 and has since been referred to as OpenAPI. Both names are used interchangeably. However, "OpenAPI" refers to the specification. "Swagger" refers to the family of open-source and commercial products from SmartBear that work with the OpenAPI Specification. Its main goals are to:
- Minimize the amount of work needed to connect decoupled services.
- Reduce the amount of time needed to accurately document a service.
Swashbuckle is one of the main OpenAPI implementations for .NET and the app engineers in New Media Aid's app development team use .Net for developing web app and APIs.
There are three main components to Swashbuckle:
- Swashbuckle.AspNetCore.Swagger: a Swagger object model and middleware to expose SwaggerDocument objects as JSON endpoints.
- Swashbuckle.AspNetCore.SwaggerGen: a Swagger generator that builds SwaggerDocument objects directly from your routes, controllers, and models. It's typically combined with the Swagger endpoint middleware to automatically expose Swagger JSON.
- Swashbuckle.AspNetCore.SwaggerUI: an embedded version of the Swagger UI tool. It interprets Swagger JSON to build a rich, customizable experience for describing the web API functionality. It includes built-in test harnesses for the public methods.
Swagger is an Interface Description Language for describing RESTful APIs expressed using JSON. Swagger is used together with a set of open-source software tools to design, build, document, and use RESTful web services. Swagger includes automated documentation, code generation (into many programming languages), and test-case generation.
API Design
Design is the foundation of your API development. Swagger makes API design a breeze, with easy-to-use tools for developers, architects, and product owners.
Model APIs with Accuracy
API design is prone to errors, and it’s extremely difficult and time-consuming to spot and rectify mistakes when modeling APIs. Swagger Editor was the first editor built for designing APIs with the OpenAPI Specification (OAS), and has continued to meet the needs of developers building APIs with OAS. The Editor validates your design in real-time, checks for OAS compliancy, and provides visual feedback on the go.
Visualize While You Design
The best APIs are designed with the end consumer in mind. Swagger tools like the Swagger Editor and SwaggerHub provide a YAML editor with a visualization panel for developers to work in and see how the API will looks and behave for your end consumer.
Standardize your Design Styles Across Teams
Delivering APIs which share common behaviors, patterns and a consistent RESTful interface will greatly ease the work of the people who build them and the consumers who want to use them. SwaggerHub is equipped with a built-in API Standardization tool that can make your APIs compliant with your organizational design guidelines.
API Development
Protocols, error handling, and code modularity are just some of the questions your teams need to address before building a great API. Swagger provides tools for quickly prototyping and building your API’s functionality.
Prototype APIs From The Design
Building APIs with the right logic and functionality fully in tune with the design can be challenging. Swagger Codegen can autogenerate your API’s boilerplate code in 20+ languages from your API’s design, allowing you to only focus on your API’s core business logic. In case your development teams need to work on different modules of code together, you can always use SwaggerHub’s code-generator for collaborative API development.
Generate SDKs to Increase Consumption
Your API consumers need easy-to-use client SDKs that help them reach their 200 response in the quickest way possible. Swagger Codegen changed the way developers build and maintain SDKs for their ever-changing APIs by letting them generate SDKs right from their OpenAPI definitions. SwaggerHub has the code generator built-in, providing a self-service mechanism for API consumers to download SDKs.
Virtualize Base Operations
API development can be cumbersome when there's many dependencies on internal and external services. Mock your API's dependiencies, and interact with them before the actual service is built using SwaggerHub’s mocking capabilities. Save time and money, and easily interact with services defined in your API contract, making for faster development and better collaboration.
API Documentation
Swagger takes the manual work out of API documentation, with a range of solutions for generating, visualizing, and maintaining API docs.
Documentation From Your API Design
The evolution of your API’s functionality is inevitable, but the headache of maintaining API docs doesn’t have to be. Swagger tools takes the hard work out of generating and maintaining your API docs, ensuring your documentation stays up-to-date as your API evolves.
Documenting Existing APIs
Documentation can be auto-generated from an API definition. But what if your existing API doesn’t have a definition? We offer the open source Swagger Core to generate the OpenAPI definitions from existing (Java) APIs code. If you want to speed up this process, you and your team can also try Swagger Inspector to automatically generate the OpenAPI file for any end point.
Maintain Multiple Documentation Versions
Your API's internal and external consumers should easily discover all available versions of your API with the required information on how to consume it. Incrementally build on top of existing API documentation, or maintain documentation for multiple versions of your API with SwaggerHub’s versioning system.
API Testing
Start your functional, security, and performance testing right from the OpenAPI Spec. Swagger tooling and the ReadyAPI platform make it easy to rapidly create, manage, & execute API tests in your pipeline.
Validate Functionality During Development
Developers are constantly required to double check if their APIs and endpoints work as intended during the development process itself. Swagger Inspector provides capabilities to easily inspect API request-responses, and make sure they work as expected.
Automate Your API Testing
Automating your API testing and verifying that it functions correctly in different scenarios is dead simple with ReadyAPI. You can import your API definitions to:
- easily validate schema rules
- automatically generate assertions against endpoints
- inject real or synthetic data into parameters
Generate Load Tests In One-Click
Testing whether your API can handle the stress of success in production has never been easier when you combine Swagger tools and ReadyAPI. You can generate complex load scenarios to test the performance and scale of your API - directly from your OAS definitions.
API Mocking and Virtualization
Reduce dependencies in your development and testing cycles and stand-up realistic, dynamic mocks in seconds with Swagger and ReadyAPI Virtualization.
API Not Yet Complete or Unavailable?
Just virtualize your OAS or other API definition file and within minutes you'll have a fully-configured, realistic API to develop on, build test cases, produce edge cases, and more. ReadyAPI Virtualization can reduce dependencies and unavailable services for faster testing and development cycles for DevOps and Agile teams.
Build Out Realistic Mock APIs in Just Minutes
Start from scratch, import an API definition, or record live API traffic in ReadyAPI Virtualization's intuitive interface to create your virtual service without needing to code or script your way through a solution for API dependencies. Once created, you can configure and share with your teammates or organization with just a simple click. Your virtual service can now be developed against, performance tested with accuracy, secured, at any point in the CI/CD pipeline.
Easily Configure Edge Case and Failures
Testing whether your API and application can handle specific scenarios and states is one of the most difficult things for modern software teams. ReadyAPI Virtualization can emulate hard-to-reproduce scenarios like losing service in a tunnel, experiencing peak traffic, or configuring test data from third-party services.
Governance and Standardization
People and processes make up a successful API program. Efficiently managing these efforts makes for good governance. Whether you have a team of five or five hundred, Swagger can help.
Standardize Design Styles Across Teams
The more the APIs being developed in your organization, the greater the need for establishing common design guidelines. SwaggerHub is equipped with built-in API Standardization that makes your APIs compliant with your organizational design guidelines. Enterprise architects can make sure teams follow design patterns successfully.
Manage Different Teams and Projects
People are the most important assets of your API lifecycle, and managing them effectively can make all the difference in your API program. Create teams and manage them centrally on SwaggerHub. The Projects feature in SwaggerHub also allows you to create folders with different APIs and permission levels so APIs can be better organized, shared and accessed by the right stakeholders.
Collaborate With Stakeholders
As your team scales, effectively managing their workflow and allowing them to freely collaborate is crucial for faster API development and delivery. Swaggerhub makes the life of developers easier, with the ability to review and merge changes, and communicate and track issues.
Manage Common Models
Design is never an isolated process, and in most cases, the models in your design, be it resources, path operations, or data models, can be used across multiple APIs. Store your team’s common design components in dedicated stores called Domains on SwaggerHub that can then be referenced and reused across all your APIs.
API Monitoring
Monitor API availability, speed, and functionality starting from your OpenAPI Specification (OAS) with AlertSite for OAS. Automate monitor creation and instantly track API behavior to ensure everything runs smoothly in production.
Start Monitoring Public & Private APIs with your Swagger Spec or OAS File
For DevOps and Ops teams to validate and optimize private and public API performance. AlertSite makes it easy to create monitors & start monitoring from all over the world & in your private networks. You can reuse OAS files, paste an API Endpoint, or use the Swagger Inspector extension to start monitoring. This trial is free for 30 Days and includes all the extensive functionalities of the AlertSite platform
Automate Monitoring with OpenAPI Specs
Reuse OAS Specs to stand up API Monitors instantly. AlertSite, from the same team behind SwaggerHub, transforms your OpenAPI Spec into an API Monitor automatically to track API performance in production and alert your team when performance deviates. Plus, AlertSite's API makes it easy to programmatically control your monitoring process.
Validate Functionality in Production
Monitor API Transactions to validate functionality in production from our 350+ nodes all over the world, both externally and behind your firewall. Add assertions and variables to validate payloads in every API call and the entire transaction.
Retain API Quality
Using your definitions to monitor, or test on demand, makes it fast and easy to pinpoint what went wrong & remediate problems quickly. Alert the right team with granular alert targeting, global retries, and notifications sent right from the monitoring nodes.
Swagger is an open-source software framework that allows developers to design, build, document, and consume RESTful APIs. It provides a standardized way to describe and document APIs, making it easier for developers to understand how to use them.
Swagger supports multiple programming languages and frameworks, including Java, Python, Ruby, and Node.js. It provides a set of tools that allow developers to automatically generate documentation, client SDKs, and server stubs based on the API definition.
The Swagger specification is written in YAML or JSON and provides a way to describe the structure and behavior of an API. It includes information such as the API endpoints, input parameters, response formats, and authentication mechanisms. By using Swagger, developers can ensure that their API is well-documented, easy to understand, and consistent with industry standards.
Swagger is a set of open-source tools and frameworks for building and documenting RESTful APIs. It was originally created by Tony Tam in 2010 and later acquired by SmartBear Software in 2015.
The Swagger toolset includes the following components:
Swagger Editor: a web-based editor for designing and documenting APIs using the OpenAPI specification (formerly known as Swagger specification).
Swagger UI: a web-based user interface for visualizing and interacting with APIs that have been documented using the OpenAPI specification.
Swagger Codegen: a code generation tool that can generate client SDKs, server stubs, and documentation for APIs based on the OpenAPI specification.
SwaggerHub: a cloud-based platform for designing, documenting, and sharing APIs using the OpenAPI specification.
The OpenAPI specification is a widely adopted standard for describing RESTful APIs, and it is supported by a large and growing number of tools and frameworks across multiple programming languages and platforms.
Using Swagger and the OpenAPI specification can help developers create well-documented, easy-to-use APIs that are more easily consumed by other developers and applications.