Modern software tools are usually easy to integrate and normally offer open APIs, which can be used to upload and manipulate data. Especially in the area of Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions,
REST is seen as the de facto standard that is offered by most providers. Although the use of the REST API for developers is intuitive by convention, the actual use can turn into a trial-and-error process due to lacking documentation and missing SDKs. To avoid this,
LeanIX provides interactive documentation for all its APIs that enables the live testing of all terminal points. Additionally,
Software Development Kits (SDKs) can be generated for various programming languages, e.g. Java, PHP, or C#.
The implementation is comfortable thanks to the Open Source Project Swagger. With Swagger, a REST API is documented in a JSON scheme. This JSON scheme can be generated directly from source code annotation and always reflects the up-to-date status of implementation, which helps to avoid disruptions between operation and documentation. Swagger also provides a Single Page App for browsers with Swagger UI that generates the interactive documentation from the API scheme (see screenshot). With the help of existing templates API, clients can be generated in almost all programming languages from the scheme. For example, LeanIX provides the API in Java, PHP, and C# (see dev.leanix.net).
Daniel Pozzi, a member of the LeanIX development team, presented Swagger to an interested audience at this year’s
Open Source Conference FrosCon and also answered questions. Here is his presentation on Slideshare (available in German only). The LeanIX team is always more than happy to answer any questions on this topic or to hear feedback.
