>> Hi, I'm Erin, I'm going to stand behind the lectern here, because I've had a lot of
caffeine today and I may actually flicker in and out of visibility.
So I am a developer advocate at IBM.
So I'm going to talk very quickly about a lot of things related to the OpenAPI specification.
I'll also show this at the end of the talk if you want to reserve judgment.
My goal for this talk is for you to have enough information about what the OpenAPI specification
can do for you and your teams so that you could decide whether it's useful for you or
not.
So spoiler alert: You probably will find it useful.
So what is the OpenAPI?
It's a standard language agnostic interface to REST APIs which allows both humans and
computers to discover and understand the capabilities of the service without access to source code,
documentation or through network traffic inspection.
That doesn't say kind of what's in it for me, right?
That's what it is.
Now, some of you may be saying, isn't that Swagger?
How many people have used Swagger in this room?
So you guys probably already know this stuff.
So I really have to say, take a minute to talk about what's Swagger and what's the OpenAPI
specification.
Swagger was its former name and if you think I just mentioned Wordnik and Meri just mention
Wordnik in 2014, Swagger was transformed to software software and in 2015, smart bear
with some other companies, including Google and Microsoft and IBM created the OpenAPI
initial under the sponsorship of the Linux organization.
So this is really complicated.
They kept the trademark, but the spec itself is part of the OpenAPI initiative.
That's a lot.
But as of July of last year, OpenAPI and Swagger-related tools have been downloaded over 100,000 times
per day according to sono type and NPM.
So that's a lot of people using this.
So the important thing to remember is it's no longer called Swagger, but it still has
swagger.
[laughter]
So it's now in version 3.
So Swagger is Version 2, OpenAPI is in version 3 and it looks a lot less scary if it's in
these nice open boxes.
It has information about what the spec is and what your servers are, and what security
hoops you have to jump through to access these paths, what the tags are that let you organize
them, external docs, which is exactly what it says on the box, a link to external documentation.
Very simple.
I did joke yesterday that I was going to do a dramatic reading of this yaml.
Now, you want people to do dramatic readings of yaml rather than JSON, because you have
to use sound effects when you're reading JSON out loud.
All of this is extremely exciting.
I can see the excitement in the room.
But we're still at the technical level.
A lot of people are not excited about what a technology is, they're more excited about
what a technology can do for you.
And the way I look to talk about the OpenAPI spec is that when you have a spec, it's like
having a bucket with a handle on it.
The essential functionality after your API or your bucket is not necessarily affected
by whether or not it has a handle or not.
But we all know that buckets with handles are easier to move, easier to pour out of
and an OpenAPI spec for your API makes everything that you want to do with that API easier to
work with.
Easier to stand up a gateway, anything, like an API just by itself without any people is
super sad and an OpenAPI spec makes your API easier to handle.
So how many people when they think of Swagger just think of this.
Like documentation.
Yeah, and you know, if that's all you ever use your spec to do, that's great.
That's fine.
You don't have to do all the things that a spec can do to get the most out of a spec.
So fun fact, the Wordnik documentation is still running 1.0.
Because the shoemaker's children always go barefoot.
It's changing soon.
I promise.
You can generate these interactive documents with your spec.
You can also do codegen.
Having a client of any kind is better than no client.
If there's a client they'll test it, if there's not a client, they won't.
And often a bad client is a really cool honey pot to get people to fix it because they look
at it, they're like, this is terrible, I could do better, and then they do!
[laughter]
There are also tools that let you upload your spec and create automated tests and monitors.
They don't just check that you're getting a 200, they also check that parameters exist
and that they're valued, which is really cool.
So some of these testing tools like dread, you run on your own.
Speaking of gateways, you can use a spec to get started quickly with API management tools,
like for instance IBM's API connect.
But almost all of the gateways that are out there let you upload a spec and this saves
you a lot of configuration time.
Nobody likes to type.
Once you have a spec, it's easier to get your API discovered and to join API marketplaces
like rapid API.
We make APIs because we want people to use them, to make it easier for humans to make
cool new things with data, and OpenAPI makes your API easier to use, which means more people
can turn ideas into reality.
Now, if you're interested in getting involved in OpenAPI spec, it's open source, you can
do it.
The technical committee meetings are actually really entertaining, and you can participate
at all levels, not just on technical level, you can try writing blog posts about it or
giving talks or talk to other people about it.
If you can't get get enough information, please think about attending the API strat conference
this fall.
So I hope a lot of you are thinking, yes!
About API.
I like to talk people into it at scale, but I will do it one-on-one if it's necessary.
So here's more of the resource links that I promise before.
Also, can you sign up for an IBM Cloud account free.
I have to mention this every time I talk, but it's really cool.
It is free.
If you want to play around with it, you if you don't necessarily have an API of your
own, it's really easy to create an API of your own that you can have as a pet.
So thank you.
Here is data that you can use to find me in other places.
I really want to thank all the lovely people on Flickr who released their images under
CC licenses so that I can release this so if you would like to give the same talk in
this order, I'm happy to make it available to you.
One last thing I talked a little fast hearings got a little lightheaded, too much talking,
not enough breathing, I also want run a semicolon appreciation society and I have lots of these stickers.
[laughter] [applause]
Which is why I actually prefer to write things in JSON because there's more semicolons, but
anyway, I have lots of these stickers, I'd be happy to give them away to you at the break
and thank you very much for your kind attention and I hope you're excited about OpenAPI.
[applause]