As I study each API, and API related service, I'm always looking for open source tooling that has been developed around these APIs and API services. This is an aggregate of tooling I've come across and aggregated as part of my API definition research.
API Blueprint is a documentation-oriented API description language. A couple of semantic assumptions over the plain Markdown. API Blueprint is perfect for designing your Web API and its comprehensive documentation but also for quick prototyping and collaboration. It is easy to learn and even easier to read; after all, it is just a form of plain text.
Barrister is a RPC system that uses an external interface definition (IDL) file to describe the interfaces and data structures that a component implements. It is similar to tools like Protocol Buffers, Thrift, Avro, and SOAP.
I/O Docs is a live interactive documentation system for RESTful web APIs. By defining APIs at the resource, method and parameter levels in a JSON schema, I/O Docs will generate a JavaScript client interface. API calls can be executed from this interface, which are then proxied through the I/O Docs server with payload data cleanly formatted.
The goal of The OpenAPI Specification is to define a standard, language-agnostic interface to REST APIs which allows both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of the service without access to source code, documentation, or through network traffic inspection. When properly defined via OpenAPI, a consumer can understand and interact with the remote service with a minimal amount of implementation logic. Similar to what interfaces have done for lower-level programming, OpenAPI removes the guesswork in calling the servi
A collection lets you group individual requests together. These requests can be further organized into folders to accurately mirror your API. Requests can also store sample responses when saved in a collection. You can add metadata like name and description too so that all the information that a developer needs to use your API is available easily.
RESTful API Description Language (RADL) is an XML vocabulary for describing Hypermedia-driven RESTful APIs. Unlike most HTTP API description languages, RADL focuses on defining a truly hypermedia-driven REST API from the client's point of view. Unlike description languages based on JSON or Markdown, RADL makes it easy to integrate documentation written in HTML or XML. The APIs that RADL describes may use any media type, in XML, JSON, HTML, or any other format.
RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML) is a simple and succinct way of describing practically-RESTful APIs. It encourages reuse, enables discovery and pattern-sharing, and aims for merit-based emergence of best practices. The goal is to help our current API ecosystem by solving immediate problems and then encourage ever-better API patterns. RAML is built on broadly-used standards such as YAML and JSON and is a non-proprietary, vendor-neutral open spec.
The RESTful Service Description Language (RSDL) is a machine- and human-readable XML description of HTTP-based web applications (typically REST web services).
Paw extension providing support to export API Blueprint as a code generator, allowing for you to publish API definitions from the web API client tooling.
The Directive on the re-use of public sector information entered into force on 31 December 2003. It was revised by Directive 2013/37/EU which entered into force on 17 July 2013. It focuses on the economic aspects of re-use of information rather than on the access of citizens to information. It encourages the Member States to make as much information available for re-use as possible. It addresses material held by public sector bodies in the Member States, at national, regional and local levels, such as ministries, state agencies, municipalities, as well as organisations funded for the most part by or under the control of public authorities.
The Open Data Charter sets out 5 strategic principles that all G8 members will act on. These include an expectation that all government data will be published openly by default, alongside principles to increase the quality, quantity and re-use of the data that is released. G8 members have also identified 14 high-value areas – from education to transport, and from health to crime and justice from which they will release data. These will help unlock the economic potential of open data, support innovation and provide greater accountability.
Under the terms of the Executive Order and a new Open Data Policy released today by the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget, all newly generated government data will be required to be made available in open, machine-readable formats, greatly enhancing their accessibility and usefulness, while ensuring privacy and security.
The purpose of Application-Level Profile Semantics (ALPS) is to document the application-level semantics of a particular implementation. This is accomplished by describing elements of response representations for a target media type. For example identifying markup elements returned (i.e. semantic HTML ala Microformats) and state transitions (i.e. HTML.A and HTML.FORM elements) that advance the state of the current application.
ADMS is a profile of DCAT, used to describe semantic assets (or just 'Assets'), defined as highly reusable metadata (e.g. xml schemata, generic data models) and reference data (e.g. code lists, taxonomies, dictionaries, vocabularies) that are used for eGovernment system development.
Describes your JSON data format in clear, human- and machine-readable documentation that is complete structural validation, useful for automated testing, and validating client-submitted data.
This RFC defines a simple schema for tabular data. The schema is designed to be expressible in JSON.
JSON-RPC is a stateless, light-weight remote procedure call (RPC) protocol. Primarily this specification defines several data structures and the rules around their processing. It is transport agnostic in that the concepts can be used within the same process, over sockets, over http, or in many various message passing environments. It uses JSON (RFC 4627) as data format.
MSON is a plain-text, human and machine readable, description format for describing data structures in common markup formats such as JSON, XML or YAML.
OData (Open Data Protocol) is an OASIS standard that defines the best practice for building and consuming RESTful APIs. OData helps you focus on your business logic while building RESTful APIs without having to worry about the approaches to define request and response headers, status codes, HTTP methods, URL conventions, media types, payload formats and query options etc.
APIs are becoming a crucial part of the Web. Unfortunately however, it remains very difficult to determine the location of these APIs on servers around the Web. The only way to discover APIs and their properties is via human driven search through public search engines or in hand curated API Directory listings. While these methods work, neither can scale to the potentially hundreds of thousands and millions of APIs which will be published over the next few years.
JSON Home Document is an HTTP API definition formated that follows the RFC4627 specification, and has the media type application/json-home.
Collection+JSON is a JSON-based read/write hypermedia-type designed to support management and querying of simple collections.
HAL is a simple format that gives a consistent and easy way to hyperlink between resources in your API. Adopting HAL will make your API explorable, and its documentation easily discoverable from within the API itself. In short, it will make your API easier to work with and therefore more attractive to client developers. APIs that adopt HAL can be easily served and consumed using open source libraries available for most major programming languages. It's also simple enough that you can just deal with it as you would any other JSON.
JSON-LD is a lightweight Linked Data format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is based on the already successful JSON format and provides a way to help JSON data interoperate at Web-scale. JSON-LD is an ideal data format for programming environments, REST Web services, and unstructured databases such as CouchDB and MongoDB.
Mason is a JSON format for introducing hypermedia elements to classic JSON data representations. With Mason, you get hypermedia elements for linking and modifying data, features for communicating to client developers and standardized error handling. Mason is built on JSON, reads JSON, writes JSON and generally fits well into a JSON based eco-system.
Semantic descriptions for hypermedia APIs. RESTdesc allows you to capture the functionality of hypermedia APIs, so automated agents can use them. Despite their powerful capabilities, RESTdesc descriptions are easy to master. The description is not a goal in itself: you want your API to be used. See how RESTdesc opens up your API for discovery, based on its functional characteristics.
This RFC defines a simple JSON format to describe the various dialects of CSV files; it aims to deal with a reasonably large subset of the features which differ between dialects (terminator strings, quoting rules, escape rules, etc), and roughly to describe the union of the capabilities of Python’s csv module, Ruby’s CSV module, and the MySQL and Postgres bulk load facilities at the time of writing (February 2013).
Data Package Identifiers are small JSON-oriented structure or strings which identify a Data Package (and, usually, its location).
This RFC defines a simple schema for tabular data. The schema is designed to be expressible in JSON.
The purpose of Application-Level Profile Semantics (ALPS) is to document the application-level semantics of a particular implementation. This is accomplished by describing elements of response representations for a target media type. For example identifying markup elements returned (i.e. semantic HTML ala Microformats) and state transitions (i.e. HTML.A and HTML.FORM elements) that advance the state of the current application.
JSON-LD is a lightweight Linked Data format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is based on the already successful JSON format and provides a way to help JSON data interoperate at Web-scale. JSON-LD is an ideal data format for programming environments, REST Web services, and unstructured databases such as CouchDB and MongoDB.
If there is a tool that you think should be listed here, let me know by submitting a Github issue or Tweeting a link at me. I'm always looking for new types of tools, and get better at organizing them here and making sense.
