After #Gluecon in Colorado the other week, I have API design on the brain. A portion of the #APIStrat un-workshops were dedicated to API design related discussion, and API Design is also the most trafficked portion of API Evangelist this year, according to my Google Analytics.
At #Gluecon, 3Scale and API Evangelist announced our new API discovery project APIs.json, and associated tooling, API search engine APIs.io. For APIs.json, APIs.io, and API Commons to work, we are counting API providers, and API consumers creating machine readable API definitions.
With this in mind, I wanted to do some exploration--what would be possible incentives for creating machine readable API definitions?
| JSON API Definition |  |
| Interactive Documentation | |
| Server Side Code Deployment | |
| Client Side Code generation | |
| Design, Mocking, and Collaboration |  |
| Markdown Based API Definition | |
| YAML Based API Definition |  |
| Reusability, Interoperability and Copyright |  |
| Testing & Monitoring |  |
| Discovery |  |
| Search |  |
The importance of having an API definition of available resources, is increasing. It was hard to realize the value of defining APIs with the heavy, top down defined WSDL, and even its web counterpart WADL, but with these new approaches, other incentives are emerging—incentives that live throughout the API lifecycle.
The first tangible shift in this area was when Swagger released the Swagger UI, providing interactive documentation that was generated from a Swagger API definition. Apiary quickly moved the incentives to an earlier stage in the API design lifecycle with design, mocking and collaboration opportunities.
As the API design world continues to explode, I’m seeing a number of other incentives emerge for API providers to generate machine readable API definitions, and looking to find any incentives that I’m missing, as well as identify any opportunities in how I can encourage API designers to generate machine readable API definitions in whatever format they desire.
