Apigee has opened up API Studio, a free online tool for creating, testing and sharing APIs.
API Studio is based on the Swagger Editor, which is a familiar tool for designing APIs in YAML. Apigee connects API Studio with a back-end server running in the cloud and providing mock responses to API requests. These mocked endpoints are automatically generated and updated as the API specification is edited.
The API can be then shared via a web link so others can have a look and see how it works. At this point, in our tests we could simulate having multiple users working on the same spec but not simultaneously. When a user edits a spec, this is automatically saved, overwriting any changes that another user might have done in the meantime. To make sure all changes are kept, users have to reload the page to get the latest version from the server, then add their own edits.
The API can be downloaded as a Node.js project providing the foundation for writing the server endpoints. It is likely that Apigee will add the option to download the API as JAX-RS, Scalatra and Spring MVC projects in the future considering that the Swagger Editor supports these types. Also, client code will be made available for many languages including Java, C#, Objective-C, PHP, Python, etc.
API Studio is currently in beta, and Apigee asks for developers’ feedback to decide the future direction of the tool.