On April 5th, 2016 Amazon announced an update to its API Management service known as Amazon API Gateway. In this update, Amazon API Gateway now supports a direct way of importing Swagger 2.0 definitions.
Swagger is a specification that allows developers to use a common description language to represent REST APIs. Developers can use swagger editors to model their REST APIs and as part of this experience, documentation and metadata are surfaced via tooling. Using Swagger definitions, mock test clients and SDKs for many languages including Java, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP and C# can be created which accelerates development timelines for organizations that want to consume your API.
Swagger has been a supported API Specification for Amazon’s API Gateway since the service was launched. But, developers previously needed to use the Swagger importer tool to import Swagger definitions into the API Gateway. The Swagger importer tool is available on Github and provides a command line tool experience.
Image Source: http://swagger.io/getting-started-with-the-amazon-swagger-importer/
Going forward, developers can use the AWS Management Console, Command Line Interface (CLI) or SDK. While in the AWS Management Console, developers have the ability to:
- Create a new API
- Clone from existing API
- Import from Swagger
- View an Example API
Image Source: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/api-gateway-create-api-from-example.html
As of January 1st, the Swagger specification has been donated to the Open API Initiative (OAI). The intent of the OAI is to bring together like-minded organizations interested in standardizing how REST APIs are described. The OAI is operating in an open governance structure under the Linux Foundation and has many industry leaders as members, including Google, Apigee, Atlassian, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft and PayPal to name a few.
Swagger is not the only API specification that is supported in Amazon API Gateway. The service also supports a competing specification called RAML. At the time of this writing, Amazon has indicated that “customers using RAML definitions should continue to use aws-apigateway-importer for the time being.” RAML is an open workgroup led by Mulesoft and has support from other members including Cisco (a Mulesoft investor), VMWare and Akana.