The SwaggerHub team kicked off 2016 with a goal to change the way teams design, build, and document their APIs with Swagger. At that time, the tool looked much different and we had only introduced the SwaggerHub platform to a small audience of development teams. It’s been quite a journey to see SwaggerHub grow from a basic concept, to a full-fledged platform that is now used by thousands of developers around the world. As we kickoff 2017, we wanted to take a look back at some of our biggest news from 2016.
Helping thousands of development teams build great APIs with Swagger
Over the course of 2016, we saw teams —
both large and small — get started with SwaggerHub. These teams work in organizations across a wide variety of industries, including software development, financial tech, medical, e-commerce, food service, entertainment, and more. Many of our users come to SwaggerHub because they are new to Swagger, and want to follow a design-first workflow for building their APIs. Others, have specific needs around documenting their existing APIs with Swagger and need a platform that lets them securely host their Swagger definitions and collaborate across teams of API designers, developers, and technical writers. In just over a year since we first launched in November, 2015, SwaggerHub has come to support over 15,000 developers, hosting more than 18,000 private and public APIs.
New tools and improved features
Listening to our users has always been an educational endeavor. We’ve taken your feedback into account and worked on some powerful new features to optimize your API workflow.
A collaborate approach to API development
Recognizing the need for providing an environment that’s conducive to collaboration, SwaggerHub added features to better support the collaborative workflow. Users can now create organizations and teams to better manage their organizational assets. We’ve also optimized our UI, with an in-built catalog for APIs which helps manage and consume critical APIs in a secure and flexible environment. SwaggerHub tightened its API documentation workflow with a new compare and merge feature. This allows users to control exactly which changes get added to an API and which do not, making collaboration a much more structured and well defined process. Coupled with real time-team interaction via SwaggerHub Comments, collaboration is a central focus of SwaggerHub. Learn more: API Collaboration with SwaggerHub
APIs could use some Source Control
While SwaggerHub is great for designing, developing, documenting and hosting APIs, we recognized the need to tie APIs into an organization’s software development workflow. Source control has emerged as the de facto platform for storing software and code. This year, the SwaggerHub team added direct integrations into popular source control hosts like GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab. With these integrations, SwaggerHub allows users to push-generate API definitions and code to their favorite repositories. There’s no need to add additional layers into your workflow to fit your APIs into your release cycle now. Learn more: Sync your API with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket
Mock on
Designing and documenting APIs becomes easier when the team can see how the API should behave. With the development of SwaggerHub’s auto-mocking feature, API designers and developers can start working with the API before any actual code has been implemented. The mock server is generated directly from the UI for your API’s back end, and lets you test your API’s operations and responses against application calls for iterating on the API’s interface. Learn more: Introducing Auto-Mocking in SwaggerHub
Serverless deployment, without the headaches
Developer experience, security, and monitoring are all important factors for a successful API, which are just some of the benefits of deploying APIs to an API Management platform. We developed integrations that can tie into your API Management solution on Microsoft Azure or Amazon API Gateway. We’ve also helped support the growing momentum around serverless deployment, through an integration with Amazon Lambda, which let’s you create Lambda functions on the API Gateway, without any of the tedious plumbing and configurations that may otherwise go into API deployment. This way, you can take care of all your API deployment needs form a single source of truth in SwaggerHub. Learn More:
Bringing SwaggerHub on Tour
We were proud to sponsor, and take part in some incredible events in 2016. We had the chance to host workshops, give presentations, and connect with thousands of people working with APIs around the world. These conferences include: GlueCon in Denver, APIStrat in Boston, AWS:Reinvent in Las Vegas, and APIDays in Paris, France.
Welcoming API Experts to SmartBear HQ
The SwaggerHub team brought together prominent thought leaders in the API industry to discuss how they approach their API strategy. The panel consisted of:
Some of the topics discussed were the transition from SOAP to REST, how organizations should approach their API management, and best practices to improve API adoption. You can watch the panel discussion here: Expert Panel: Developing an API Strategy for 2017 [Video]
Continuing to build new resources for API Success
We’ve furthered our commitment to your API success on SwaggerHub with our free, bi-weekly, live training webinars. These webinars are geared towards walking through the various features of SwaggerHub that accelerate the various phases of your API lifecycle. You can find more information about the series here. In addition, we’ve added new tutorials including:
And have welcomed a number of API experts to share their knowledge on the SwaggerHub Blog. You can keep up with our latest news and resources by following SwaggerHub on Twitter: @SwaggerHub. We’re honored and excited to see so many engineers and organizations trust us for their API solutions, and we hope to deliver better features and improvements as we usher in a new year.
The API Economy and How to Optimize Your Organization's Swagger API Workflow
Recognizing APIs as a valuable driver of business goals was a fairly recent development, and companies have now started to invest heavily in their API strategy. This has been accompanied by an explosion in adoption in API description formats, like Swagger, which help streamline development and drive adoption for organizations’ APIs. In our upcoming webinar,
The API Economy and How to Optimize Your Organization's Swagger API Workflow, we will walk through understanding how organizations should think of their API strategy, and how API description formats like Swagger can help. We will offer best practices for establishing a workflow for your API lifecycle, and introduce you to how your team can use SwaggerHub to collaborate on the design, documentation, and development of your API. Some of the topics covered include:
- What is an API strategy?
- What are some of the business opportunities APIs present?
- What are the requirements for a successful API strategy?
- Deciding on the right approach to API development
- Optimizing the API workflow using SwaggerHub
The webinar is Wed, Jan 25 @ 1:00pm ET.
Register Now!