API-First Approach with Swagger Framework

API-First Approach with Swagger Framework

4-5 minutes

Today, both humans and systems are consuming data. Humans consume data across different applications, and often from many different devices; especially you’re integrating various services for the cloud, then your ultimate goal is to have those applications be the participants in an ecosystem of service. Many different types of devices mean the same set of data required to be visualized in many different screen sizes. Organizations must build apps that look good and work well across all devices with a good design set of API.

Web APIs have been around for nearly 20 years, but it is only in the past few years that the concept of “API first” has gained traction with software teams. The number of developers taking an API-first approach to building products is rising and growing inprominence. The API economy is growing rapidly and APIs are becoming an integral part of a company’s growth strategies.

API-First Approach

APIs allow companies to break down capabilities into individual, autonomous, consistent and reusable services, which can be accomplished by using an API description language to establish a contract for how the API is supposed to behave. By building on top of APIs, your developers are saving a lot of work while laying down the foundations for others to build on top of.

An API-first strategy allows organizations to build APIs that serve all applications, and applications can be developed and maintained efficiently and can help ensure a good user experience (UX) for all devices, platforms, and operating systems. An API-first approach to building products provides many benefits includes:

1. Development teams can work in parallel
2. Organizations get valuable feedback in the early stages of design, which helps with developing a service that delivers value to an API’s eventual consumers.
3. The consistency is enforced across APIs for a range of devices that will potentially consume the API, and thus, will significantly reduce the cost of developing and time of market of these apps

What is Swagger?

API is the best way of connecting software engineers and sharing valuable data and developments. Through API, programmers access a network of shared pieces of code and user experiences. However, to access them they need clear documentation.

Standard for Document APIs

Noteworthy that earlier there was not an only industry standard for developing APIs, but there was no standard for documenting them. Swagger is the largest framework for designing APIs using a common language and enabling the development across the whole API lifecycle, including documentation, design, testing, and deployment.

Who Use and Support Swagger?

What’s important, a Swagger framework is supported by such corporations as Google, Microsoft, and Atlassian. Also, giants like Yelp and Netflix have already used it in their work. Two years ago Swagger’s specification was renamed the Open API Specification and moved to the Linux Foundation. The framework provides a set of tools that help programmers generate client or server code and install self-generated documentation for web services.