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Software development tools provider SmartBear Software has released a major upgrade to its SwaggerHub developer collaboration environment.
SwaggerHub is a place for development teams to collaborate and coordinate the entire lifecycle of an API. With the new release, SwaggerHub users can now create organizations and teams to organize, share and collaborate on Swagger API definitions directly in SwaggerHub, where public and private APIs are stored in a single, easy to use SaaS product.
“As services move toward public APIs, the value of having accessible API definitions in the OpenAPI Specification Format is becoming more apparent to developers and service providers alike,” Tony Tam, vice president of Swagger products at SmartBear, said in a statement. “With free and paid accounts, SwaggerHub is moving the API beyond code and into a first-class software artifact. With its robust API, end users can access their API definitions from external tools, keeping a central source-of-truth for the service interface.”
SwaggerHub allows users to discover and view public API definitions in its public registry, which contains more than 2,500 APIs. Yet, during development, or for internal or sensitive services, it is often necessary to limit access to API definitions and versions. So SwaggerHub now enables developers to keep APIs private to users designated as collaborators. Inside SwaggerHub, a fine-grained access control can now be assigned to APIs.
Users also can create organizations to associate their APIs and find public APIs under an organization namespace. Within the scope of an organization, teams can be created, allowing for a fine-grained association of users to logical groups. Now these teams of users can be given read-only or read-write permissions against multiple API definitions in a single step.
“SwaggerHub lets you import and export your JSON [JavaScript Object Notation] or YAML Swagger definitions, giving you an environment for storing, searching, versioning and collaborating around the definitions,” said Kin Lane, blogging as the API Evangelist about SwaggerHub in an October post. “Using the platform, you can edit Swagger definitions using Swagger Editor, generate server and client side code with Swagger CodeGen, and play with the API using Swagger UI—all wrapped in this new versioned and collaborative API design environment.”
SmartBear officials said with the rapid adoption of the Swagger Specification, which has been donated to the Open API Initiative under The Linux Foundation, more developers have been benefiting from the value of a contract-first API design. SwaggerHub was developed by members of the core Swagger development team with the goal of elevating the importance of design before coding and collaboration on the intent of the API.
SmartBear acquired the Swagger API open-source project from Reverb Technologies last March.
Swagger is an API description format used by developers in modern programming languages and deployment environments to design and deliver APIs that fuel Internet of things (IoT), microservices and mobile applications in the connected world. With the acquisition, SmartBear provided support for two widely adopted API open-source initiatives, SoapUI and Swagger.
“Swagger has been the clear leader of the API description format discussion for several years—its ecosystem and passionate community is unsurpassed in the field,” Ole Lensmar, CTO at SmartBear, said in a statement at the time of the acquisition. “We look forward to working with Tony Tam, Swagger’s creator, to give Swagger the dedicated backing and support it needs for growth, primarily to ensure the open-source project’s evolution but also to ease its adoption into enterprise scenarios.”
Swagger is a simple representation of RESTful APIs. With Swagger, API developers can easily deliver interactive documentation, client SDKs and discoverable APIs. With its code-generation capabilities and open-source tools, Swagger makes it easy for developers to go from design to implementation in a short amount of time. Swagger helps leading technology companies and enterprises like Microsoft, IBM, Apigee, Getty Images, Intuit, LivingSocial, McKesson, Morningstar and PayPal build services with RESTful APIs.
“Since first being released in 2011, Swagger has found broad adoption in startups, midsize and enterprise companies alike; it has grown far beyond what we had envisioned,” Tam said in a statement at the time of the acquisition. “Now it’s time to take Swagger to the next level and we have chosen to partner with SmartBear because they have the API expertise and proven commitment to open-source with products like SoapUI. With SmartBear, Swagger will reach more developers, products and services, and make an even bigger impact on the API world.”