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Here at DevNet, we really love APIs. (Duh!) And while we hope you enjoy consuming Cisco’s APIs and making awesome integrated solutions with us, if you’ve ever worked on a software project of any complexity you’ve likely been faced with creating your own private/internal (or even public facing) APIs.

Putting together a few GET requests and an HTTP listener for a client/server app you control is fairly easy. However, once you start adding components, users, external consumers, and complexity… well, keeping that API stable-yet-flexible (while keeping Q/A, documentation, native libraries, etc. in sync) can become tricky very quickly!

David Staudt Open API pic

API ‘design-first’ philosophy (core to the OpenAPI project) aims to solve some of those headaches by providing specs for formally defining a REST API in detail, along with tools and automation to help you use that definition to automatically generate related assets downstream.  Think: beautiful interactive docs, working mock servers, server-side implementation stubs and complete native language client libraries all ‘compiled’ automatically.

Join me at DevNet Create

If this sounds interesting (and as a software dev, believe me it is!), please join me at Cisco’s DevNet Create virtual event for my session, “API Design-First – Not Just Another Pretty Interface.” In this session we will:

  • talk about API design-first philosophy,
  • demo sample API definition and asset-generation tools from the OpenAPI Specification project
  • touch on how to design not just easy-to-build APIs, but easy-to-use APIs.

Register now to attend DevNet Create

David-Staudt-Swagger-EditorSwagger Editor gives you tools and automation to help you use definitions
to automatically generate related assets downstream.

 


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Authors

David Staudt

Cisco Principal Engineer

DevNet Developer Advocate