API teams are now ‘a thing’
Software quality tools company SmartBear has now announced support for OpenAPI Specification (OAS) in its AlertSite product.
So let’s break that down and think about what it means in terms of the way the so-called API economy is developing.
The OpenAPI specification is a definition format to describe RESTful APIs (a web services interoperability standard) — it makes APIs easier to a) develop and b) integrate into a wider application structure because it maps out all the resources and operations associated with the API itself.
AlertSite is a performance monitoring tool for web, mobile, cloud and APIs that simulates key user journeys from real browsers — this means that developers can monitor applications and website performance from the end user’s perspective.
So in summary… SmartBear has put higher level open specifications support into its own API monitoring tool.
API economy, API teams
The company says that the API economy continues to grow — and now we are seeing actual ‘API teams’ — who are increasingly adopting the OpenAPI Specification in order to standardize their APIs and improve maintenance, adoption, and consumption.
According to SmartBear VP Anand Sundaram, “However [despite the above being true], many teams lack the time or expertise to implement an API monitoring tool to ensure their APIs function as designed once they are deployed. With the new OpenAPI support in AlertSite, development and operations teams can instantly create API monitors from their existing OAS files, thereby extending OAS standardisation from design to deployment and gaining actionable insights into the performance and availability of their APIs.”
The new support for the OAS in AlertSite builds on existing API monitoring integrations with SoapUI and SoapUI Pro, and is the first of several new API monitoring integrations and functionalities planned for 2018.