OpenAPI Specification | |
Year started | 2010 |
---|---|
First published | 10 August 2011 |
Latest version | 3.1.0 15 February 2021 |
Website | openapis |
The OpenAPI Specification, previously known as the Swagger Specification, is a specification for a machine-readable interface definition language for describing, producing, consuming and visualizing web services. [1] Previously part of the Swagger framework, it became a separate project in 2015, overseen by the OpenAPI Initiative, an open-source collaboration project of the Linux Foundation. [2] [3]
An OpenAPI Description (OAD) [4] represents a formal description of an API that tools can use to generate code, documentation, test cases, and more.
Swagger development began in early 2010 by Tony Tam, who was working at online dictionary company Wordnik. [5]
In March 2015, SmartBear Software acquired the open-source Swagger API specification from Reverb Technologies, Wordnik's parent company. [6]
In November 2015, SmartBear announced that it was donating the Swagger specification to a new organization called the OpenAPI Initiative, under the sponsorship of the Linux Foundation. Other founding member companies included 3scale, Apigee, Capital One, Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, PayPal, and Restlet. [7] [8]
On 1 January 2016, the Swagger specification was renamed the OpenAPI Specification (OAS) and was moved to a new GitHub repository. [9]
In July 2017, the OpenAPI Initiative released version 3.0.0 of its specification. [10] MuleSoft, the main contributor to the alternative RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML), joined the OAS and open-sourced its API Modeling Framework tool, which can generate OAS documents from RAML input. [11]
In February 2021, the OpenAPI Initiative released version 3.1.0. [12] Major changes in OpenAPI Specification 3.1.0 include JSON schema vocabularies alignment, new top-level elements for describing webhooks that are registered and managed out of band, support for identifying API licenses using the standard SPDX identifier, allowance of descriptions alongside the use of schema references and a change to make the PathItems object optional to simplify creation of reusable libraries of components. [13] [14] [15]
Version | Date | Notes [16] |
---|---|---|
3.1.0 | 2021-02-15 | Release of the OpenAPI Specification 3.1.0 |
3.0.3 | 2020-02-20 | Patch release of the OpenAPI Specification 3.0.3 |
3.0.2 | 2018-10-08 | Patch release of the OpenAPI Specification 3.0.2 |
3.0.1 | 2017-12-06 | Patch release of the OpenAPI Specification 3.0.1 |
3.0.0 | 2017-07-26 | Release of the OpenAPI Specification 3.0.0 |
2.0 | 2014-09-08 | Release of Swagger 2.0 |
1.2 | 2014-03-14 | Initial release of the formal document |
1.1 | 2012-08-22 | Release of Swagger 1.1 |
1.0 | 2011-08-10 | First release of the Swagger Specification |
The OAS describes the format for OpenAPI Descriptions (OADs), [4] which can be used by a variety of applications, libraries, and tools.
Applications can use OADs to automatically generate documentation of methods, parameters and data models. This helps keep the documentation, client libraries and source code in sync. [17]
When an OAD is used to generate source code stubs for servers, the process is called scaffolding.
The paradigm of agreeing on an API contract first and then programming business logic afterwards, in contrast to coding the program first and then writing a retrospective description of its behavior as the contract, is called contract-first development. Since the interface is determined before any code is written, downstream developers can mock the server behavior and start testing right away. [18] In this sense, contract-first development is also a practice of shift-left testing.
The OpenAPI Specification is language-agnostic. With OpenAPI's declarative resource specification, clients can understand and consume services without knowledge of server implementation or access to the server code. [1]
The OpenAPI Initiative maintains a list of implementations for version 3.0 of the specification. [19]
The OpenAPI Initiative sponsors an annual API Specifications Conference (ASC). The event has its origins in the API Strategy and Practice Conference (APIStrat) that ran for many years and became part of the OpenAPI Initiative in 2016.
This is a comparison of notable free and open-source configuration management software, suitable for tasks like server configuration, orchestration and infrastructure as code typically performed by a system administrator.
An open API is a publicly available application programming interface that provides developers with programmatic access to a software application or web service. Open APIs are APIs that are published on the internet and are free to access by consumers.
Bitbucket is a Git-based source code repository hosting service owned by Atlassian. Bitbucket offers both commercial plans and free accounts with an unlimited number of private repositories.
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Node.js is a cross-platform, open-source JavaScript runtime environment that can run on Windows, Linux, Unix, macOS, and more. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript engine, and executes JavaScript code outside a web browser.
CommonJS is a project to standardize the module ecosystem for JavaScript outside of web browsers.
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Docker is a set of platform as a service (PaaS) products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. The service has both free and premium tiers. The software that hosts the containers is called Docker Engine. It was first released in 2013 and is developed by Docker, Inc.
RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML) is a YAML-based language for describing static APIs. It provides all the information necessary to describe APIs on the level 2 of the Richardson Maturity Model. Although designed with RESTful APIs in mind, RAML is not capable of describing APIs that obey all constraints of REST. It encourages reuse, enables discovery and pattern-sharing and aims for merit-based emergence of best practices.
Swagger is a suite of tools for API developers from SmartBear Software and a former specification upon which the OpenAPI Specification is based.
The Open Container Initiative (OCI) is a Linux Foundation project, started in June 2015 by Docker, CoreOS, and the maintainers of appc to design open standards for operating system-level virtualization (containers). At launch, OCI was focused on Linux containers and subsequent work has extended it to other operating systems.
GraphQL is a data query and manipulation language for APIs, that allows a client to specify what data it needs. A GraphQL server can fetch data from separate sources for a single client query and present the results in a unified graph, so it is not tied to any specific database or storage engine.
SmartBear Software is an American privately-held information technology company that delivers tools for application performance monitoring (APM), software development, software testing, API testing and API management. The company is based in Assembly Square in Somerville in the Greater Boston Area. The company was founded in 2009 when SmartBear, AutomatedQA and Pragmatic Software were acquired by Insight Venture Partners.
The tools listed here support emulating or simulating APIs and software systems. They are also called API mocking tools, service virtualization tools, over the wire test doubles and tools for stubbing and mocking HTTP(S) and other protocols. They enable component testing in isolation.
ROCm is an Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) software stack for graphics processing unit (GPU) programming. ROCm spans several domains: general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU), high performance computing (HPC), heterogeneous computing. It offers several programming models: HIP, OpenMP, and OpenCL.
The Redfish standard is a suite of specifications that deliver an industry standard protocol providing a RESTful interface for the management of servers, storage, networking, and converged infrastructure.
Microsoft, a technology company historically known for its opposition to the open source software paradigm, turned to embrace the approach in the 2010s. From the 1970s through 2000s under CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft viewed the community creation and sharing of communal code, later to be known as free and open source software, as a threat to its business, and both executives spoke negatively against it. In the 2010s, as the industry turned towards cloud, embedded, and mobile computing—technologies powered by open source advances—CEO Satya Nadella led Microsoft towards open source adoption although Microsoft's traditional Windows business continued to grow throughout this period generating revenues of 26.8 billion in the third quarter of 2018, while Microsoft's Azure cloud revenues nearly doubled.
Fyne is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs) across desktop and mobile platforms. It is designed to enable developers to build applications that run on multiple desktop and mobile platforms/versions from a single code base. Fyne uses OpenGL to provide cross-platform graphics. It is inspired by the principles of Material Design to create applications that look and behave consistently across all platforms. It is licensed under the terms of the 3-clause BSD License, supporting the creation of free and proprietary applications. In December 2019 Fyne became the most popular GUI toolkit for Go, by GitHub star count and in early February 2020 it was trending as #1 project in GitHub trending ranks.
OpenAtom OpenHarmony, abbreviated as OpenHarmony (OHOS) is a family of open-source distributed operating systems based on HarmonyOS derived from LiteOS, donated the L0-L2 branch source code by Huawei to the OpenAtom Foundation. Similar to HarmonyOS, the open-source distributed operating system is designed with a layered architecture, consisting of four layers from the bottom to the top: the kernel layer, system service layer, framework layer, and application layer. It is also an extensive collection of free software, which can be used as an operating system or in parts with other operating systems via Kernel Abstraction Layer subsystems.
Having the Swagger (or for that matter, any other machine-readable) document available, team members can start working on their part of the project at the same time.