DEVOPSdigest

SmartBear announced a new version of its API design and documentation tool, SwaggerHub, integrating Stoplight’s API open source tools.

The integration enriches the customer experience by giving development teams and others the ability to create higher quality, more reliable, and easily adoptable APIs. Last August, SmartBear acquired Stoplight, a global API design-first company popular with developers. The new integration, along with SwaggerHub’s recently launched API portal and contract testing from its PactFlow acquisition in 2022, is creating a comprehensive and composable API development hub, providing complete visibility, automation, and productivity for teams looking to modernize API practices.

“SmartBear’s mission is to empower customers with the solutions and capabilities they need to drive quality and efficiency across development teams,” said Sean Butler, Vice President of Product Management at SmartBear. “Integrating Stoplight's advanced API design features into SwaggerHub highlights this commitment to enhance the API development lifecycle, particularly critical now with the onslaught of AI-related APIs. Customers can expect multiple benefits, including a seamless developer experience from API design to deployment.”

The integration of Spectral into SwaggerHub now, combined with the upcoming integration of Stoplight's visual editor, enhances API design and governance by offering advanced linting, style guide enforcement, and a user-friendly design interface. This combination ensures that API designs not only adhere to best practices and organizational standards from the outset but also benefit from an easy-to-use visual editing tool. By facilitating the maintenance of high-quality APIs that are simpler to manage and evolve, this integration optimizes the API design process, ensures consistency across the API portfolio, and significantly reduces errors.

For enhancing the flexibility and user experience of API documentation, SwaggerHub Portal incorporates Elements. Users can now choose to render their OpenAPI definitions using either open source option, Elements or SwaggerUI. This upgrade transforms static API documentation into an engaging, easy-to-navigate experience, making it simpler for developers to understand and work with others’ APIs. Enhanced documentation leads to increased adoption rates, fostering a more vibrant ecosystem around API offerings.

Prism, available later this year in SwaggerHub Explore, will support API reliability and consistency through its advanced mocking capabilities. This will allow developers to instantly create mock servers based on their API definitions, enabling parallel development workflows that dramatically shorten time-to-market for new features. It also enhances API quality through rigorous validation against OpenAPI specifications.

This year, SmartBear is realigning 20+ products into three intuitive solution hubs – API Hub, Test Hub, and Insight Hub – to simplify the customer experience. Through a seamless integration of robust API tools, including SwaggerHub, API Hub will equip development teams to pragmatically deliver quality APIs at scale.