Swagger

I’ve been asked recently, what’s the difference between Swagger and Thrift (or gRPC)? Although they look similar, they solve fundamentally different problems. Let’s look at the differences. Swagger At the most basic level, Swagger is a REST API specification language. The great part is that there is an entire ecosystem of tools built around this specification language to support API design, client and server code generation, and interactive documentation. Key Features REST + JSON API framework. JSON requests and responses. Code generation. Documentation generation. Thrift Thrift is a software framework for supporting RPC. An interface definition language is used to describe your system in terms of data types and interfaces, the Thrift compiler generates client and server code that match your definition, and the Thrift library handles serialization and transport. ...

Amazon’s API Gateway provides the ability to transform a response from an endpoint into a different format for return to the client. One thing I wished to accomplish with this was to return a value to the client, only if it was set in the response. Essentially, I wanted to check for the existence of a JSON property in the response, and react accordingly. The solution was not obvious to me, and this post serves to record that solution for posterity. ...

As part of testing our Amazon API Gateway deployment, we set up JUnit tests to run automated Swagger/OpenAPI validation using Swagger Request Validator and REST-assured. This allows us to write simple tests in a fluent style, with automatic validation that requests and responses match the Swagger API specification deployed to API Gateway. given() .log().all() .filter(validationFilter) .when() .post("/oauth2/token") .then() .assertThat() .statusCode(200); Out of the box, REST-assured does not work with Amazon’s API Gateway endpoints using Java 8. Attempting to use it results in a handshake error when connecting to the API Gateway endpoint. ...

In our previous article on Swagger, we defined a Player API modelling GET access to a Player resource. In this article, I show how to use Swagger’s security models to to deploy this API using an OAuth2 configuration. Swagger handles authentication and authorization using a combination of a “Security Definitions” Object and a list of “Security Requirements” Objects. Each of these definitions are applied at the top-level of your Swagger specification. ...

Full sample code for this article is available on Github. Aamazon’s API Gateway supports the direct importing of Swagger specification files using CloudFormation rules. To do this, you have two choices. Injecting the swagger.json or swagger.yaml file directly into the Body field of the CloudFormation template, or uploading the swagger.json or swagger.yaml file to an S3 location and setting that location as the BodyS3Location field of the CloudFormation template. A minimal YAML template is listed below: ...

The goal of Swagger is to define a standard interface for describing REST APIs. In an ideal world, a Swagger definition for your API will allow both humans and computers to discover and understand your API. At it’s core, Swagger is a formal specification of an API. Surrounding this specification are a wide swath of tools to support creating documentation, providing client libraries, and managing API deployments. One of Swagger’s original goal was to provide a way to document an API in both a human and machine readable way. Swagger provides such a documentation format for RESTful APIs. By augmenting this documentation format with tools for API clients and developers, Swagger grew into an ecosystem providing for API developers and consumers. ...