Swagger is a toolset that simplifies the design, development, documentation, and publishing of REST APIs based on OpenAPI specifications.
The Swagger toolset consists of open-source and paid tools: Swagger Editor, Swagger UI, Swagger Codegen, Swagger Hub, Swagger Inspector, ReadyAPI, and AlertSite.
Why Swagger?
The Swagger toolset makes designing APIs simple. While it is very cumbersome to design APIs, Swagger provides tools like Swagger Editor and Swagger Hub to visually design APIs validated against OpenAPI specifications in real-time.
Swagger includes tools to quickly prototype API design and generate client SDKs and server stubs for various languages using Swagger Codegen. API documentation and publishing the APIs is a breeze using the Swagger UI and Swagger Hub. The Swagger Hub enforces style, standards, and compliance for APIs by keeping the design in one place and shared across engineering teams. It supports teams and projects for ease of organization and access control. It supports common models as Domains that can be shared across various APIs and further strengthens standardization.
See my other posts on Building an API using the Swagger toolchain and Roundup of API Platforms and Specifications for a deep dive into working with the Swagger toolset for designing APIs.
The Swagger Inspector enables developers and QA alike to validate, inspect and test requests/responses for APIs. The ReadyAPI tool automates the functional, security, and performance testing of APIs. It enables validating schemas, generating assertions, and injecting real/synthetic parameter data for easy automated load and stress testing for APIs. The ReadyAPI Virtualization tool lets developers import API definitions or record live API calls to dynamically build out mock APIs.
AlertSite tool enables monitoring of private and public APIs based on the Swagger specification file, to track API performance in production. It has a built-in API browsing and a testing tool like Postman, that enables API testing in real-time.