SmartBear Looks To Speed Up Design, Documenting APIs with Updated, Unified Swagger UI and Editor

SmartBear Software is offering a new unified open source Swagger Editor and UI to make it easier to design, document and consume APIs using the OpenAPI/Swagger toolchain.  SmartBear also adds IBM Cloud to its commercial SwaggerHub integrated API platform offering.

by Yves de Montcheuil (@ydemontcheuil) & Vance McCarthy

Tags: API, BlueMix, IBM, cloud, integration, OpenAPI, open source SmartBear, Swagger, toolchain,

Aiming to increase usability and adoption of that OpenAPI/Swagger toolchain, SmartBear Software is offering a new unified Swagger open source Editor and UI.

 

In the latest unified version, SmartBear “merges the Swagger Editor and UI technologies into a single platform and code-base that is easier to integrate and work with [and brings] speed and reliability to the forefront of the API design and documentation process.” Tony Tam, SmartBear’s vice president of Swagger Products said in a statement.  Github source code repositories indicate that this release belongs to the 3.x branch of the projects. The latest version of the open source Swagger Editor and Swagger UI aim to offers a more unified API design and documentation experience, added SmartBear’s Keshav Vasudevan. 

 

To drill down on some of SmartBear’s notable improvements to Swagger Editor and Swagger UI version 3 include:

  • The size of the tools has been reduced by 80 percent.  This makes for a more agile experience designing concrete, robust and long APIs.
  • Adds extensibility mechanisms for the first time.  This allows users to fully customize the interface and build their own functionality on top of the core Swagger platform.
  • Features provide improved and “more precise” error feedback, as well as  “complete syntax auto-completion.”  This allows API developers to design and build APIs much more efficiently.

 

“The new Swagger Editor and UI have been reengineered from the ground up, merging the codes into one unified codebase, that will make it easier to work with and contribute to the open source projects,” said Ron Ratovsky, a Swagger developer evangelist at SmartBear.  “This unified experience establishes a common framework for developers and end users to design, engineer and consume APIs written in the OpenAPI Specification.”

 

 

“The new Swagger Editor and UI accommodate feedback from tens of thousands of members from the developer community, and like their predecessors, are fully open source,” Ratovsky added.

 

SmartBear’s new v3 also provide a wide range of day-to-day innovation to speed up and simplify API design and development.  For example, Swagger UI (in v3) provides developers:

Freedom from any dependency:  lets users host the Swagger UI in any environment

 

Human friendliness: allow developers to easily interact and try out every operation your API exposes for easy consumption

 

Easy navigation: quickly find and work with resources and endpoints with neatly categorized documentation

 

Browser support: works in all major browsers

 

Customization: style and tweak the Swagger UI the way the developer wants to work – and retain full source code access

For its part, the Swagger Editor (v3) offers these benefits:

Runs anywhere: the Editor works in any development environment, be it locally or in the web

 

Smart feedback: validate syntax for Swagger-compliance as it is being written (with concise feedback and error handling)

 

Instant visualization: render an API specification visually and interact with an API while still defining it

 

Intelligent auto-completion: write syntax faster with a smart and intelligent auto-completion

 

Fully customizable: easy to configure and customize a wide range of considerations, from line-spacing to themes

 

All about build efficiencies: generate server stubs and client libraries for your API in every popular language

SmartBear Extends the Power of Swagger & OpenAPI Specification

From the start, the Swagger framework was designed to allow APIs to be described in a common language (first called Swagger and now known as the OpenAPI Specification).  This “common language” allowed every human and machine involved in the API lifecycle to understand, work and integrate with that API. 

 

SmartBear’s latest update in part now lets API developers extend that power through the entire toolchain, and the community that works with those tools.

 

Ratovsky went on to describe this benefit in recent blog post on the Swagger project site:

The Swagger UI gave life to the OpenAPI Specification (formerly the Swagger Specification), allowing users to visualize and interact with the API in a format that’s easy to read and understand.

[…] While the specification is the core of the framework, there is an entire toolchain around it to enhance the API development process. The most popular and fundamental tools to better implement the Swagger framework are the Swagger Editor and Swagger UI.

 

SmartBear’s Swagger Editor and Swagger UI v3 is compatible with today’s OpenAPI Specification 2.0. Tam said it is also designed to work with the coming OpenAPI Specification 3.0, due to be released later this year.

 

SmartBear’s Push To Promote API-Friendliness Extends To IBM Cloud

Beyond the new open source option, SmartBear is building on its commercial integrated API development platform called SwaggerHub.

 

Built for development teams, SwaggerHub combines the power of the open source Swagger tools with advanced features to build, document and deploy APIs. SwaggerHub offers a collaborative API development environment in a centralized platform to orchestrate various operations, Tam added.  “This unified experience establishes a common framework for developers and end users to design, engineer and consume APIs written in the OpenAPI Specification,” he said. 

 

Last month, SwaggerHub debuted its integration with IBM Cloud, allowing development teams using it to deploy APIs directly to IBM Bluemix and more than 150 technologies and services, including cognitive computing, blockchain, Internet of Things, cloud data services, DevOps, security and integration.

 

IBM API Connect in Bluemix offers a native API management experience, to create, run, manage and secure APIs. Using the new SwaggerHub integration with IBM Bluemix, users can design and document APIs and seamlessly deploy onto API Connect in Bluemix -- with minimal configurations.

 

“The new integration with IBM Bluemix helps developers easily develop and deploy their Swagger-based APIs to the IBM API Connect instance on the IBM Bluemix cloud platform, ensuring the definition of Bluemix is always up-to-date based on the design in SwaggerHub,” Tam added.

 

SwaggerHub combines the capabilities of the open source Swagger tools (Swagger Editor, Swagger UI and Swagger Codegen), with advanced and features to build, document and deploy APIs.  SwaggerHub enables development teams to collaborate and coordinate the entire lifecycle of an API with the flexibility to integrate with a team’s toolset of choice.




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