OpenAPISwagger

OpenAPISwagger is the ecosystem surrounding the OpenAPI Specification and the Swagger tooling used to describe, document, and generate code for RESTful APIs. The OpenAPI Specification is a vendor-neutral, machine-readable interface description for HTTP APIs. The term OpenAPI Swagger is sometimes used informally to refer to both the specification and the Swagger tools, though strictly speaking OpenAPI is the spec and Swagger is a set of accompanying tools.

The Swagger project began as the Swagger Specification created by Tony Tam in 2010. It evolved into Swagger 2.0 and was widely adopted. In 2016 the OpenAPI Initiative, hosted by the Linux Foundation, was formed to standardize the specification, and the project was renamed to OpenAPI; subsequent versions are part of OAS 3.x. The Swagger brand continues as a family of tools maintained by SmartBear and community contributors, including Swagger UI (interactive API docs), Swagger Editor (editor for OAS documents), Swagger Codegen (client/server code generation), and SwaggerHub (collaborative API design and hosting).

APIs described in OpenAPI can be authored in YAML or JSON, and are consumed by many code generators, validators, and API gateways. The ecosystem emphasizes clarity in describing endpoints, parameters, responses, security, and data models using JSON Schema-like structures. Adoption ranges from small services to large enterprises, with widespread support across languages and platforms.