OVER THE WIRE
The RepreZen Team Blog

A lot of API providers have been waiting to upgrade from OpenAPI 2.0 to 3.0 as their go-to API description language. Most have been looking for two things: (1) signs of broader adoption; and (2) more robust tool support.

OpenAPI is an extensible language. And over the past few days, I've been exploring new ways to make those language extensions more discoverable and easier to use.

KaiZen OpenAPI Editor is an Eclipse-based editor for the OpenAPI Specification (OAS). OpenAPI v2, formerly known as the Swagger specification, is the most widely used and supported API description language, and OpenAPI v3 is a new major version, released in July 2017 with significant new features and improvements.

KaiZen OpenAPI Editor supports both OpenAPI v2 and v3, and it's available now on the Eclipse Marketplace.

Are you excited about OpenAPI 3.0?

Here's why it matters: The Swagger 2.0 specification was released 2½ years ago, emerging as the de facto industry standard for API definition and documentation. SmartBear made it official a year later, in November 2015 with the formation of the OpenAPI Initiative under the Linux Foundation, with Google, IBM, Microsoft and others as founding members.

The next generation of API modeling is now here. With the OpenAPI Spec v3 Draft release, developers can describe a broader range of modern REST APIs in greater detail, including hyperlinks, webhooks, better JSON Schema support, rich examples, and more.

At RepreZen, we're excited and working hard to bring the full range of OpenAPI 3.0's expanded capabilities into the RepreZen API Studio design experience. KaiZen OpenAPI Parser, now available on GitHub, is the first cornerstone of our open source stack for OpenAPI 3, based on the draft spec. It's built for speed, and highly configurable. If you're building OpenAPI 3 tooling or solutions in Java, this is a great place to start.

APIs are the neural connections of the digital economy, allowing systems to connect, collaborate, and converse with meaningful data. But these connections don't start with fully working APIs; they start with API design.

RepreZen API Studio started with the goal of enabling deep interoperability, by unifying data representations across APIs. The core of the product was the API modeling language that became RAPID-ML. API Studio provides the tooling: the RAPID-ML editor, live documentation and diagram views, sandbox testing and code gen framework.