There Is A Big Opportunity Right Now When It Comes To API Design Tooling

API design and definitions are the number one area when it comes to talks submitted for APIStrat 2015 in Austin, and when it comes to traffic across the API Evangelist network in 2015. After diving into the Amazon API Gateway a little more over the weekend, I was reminded of the opportunity out there when it comes to API design tooling.

Amazon did a good job, providing a GUI interface for crafting the methods, resources, and underlying data models for APIs you are deploying using the gateway. However when you compare to some of the GUI API design editors I mentioned in my last post on this subject, from Restlet, APIMATIC, and Gelato, the Amazon interface clearly needs evolve a little more.

AWS is just getting started with their solution, so I'm not knocking what they have done. I just wanted to keep comparing of all of the solutions as they emerge, and highlight the opportunity for some standardization in this layer of API tooling. I see a pretty big opportunity for some player to step up and provide an open source API design editor that provides a seamless experience across API service providers. 

This post is nothing new. I am just trumpeting the call for open API design tooling each time I see another new interface introduced for crafting APIs, their paths, resources, parameters, headers, authentication, and underlying data models. At some point, a new player will emerge with the open source API design editor I am looking for, or one of the existing players open sources their current offering, and evolve it in context of the wider API design space, providing an abstracted layer that supports all API definition formats.

With the growth in the number of service providers I see stepping up to server the API space, the need for common, open tooling when it comes to API design is only going to grow. It took almost four years of waiting for the API management space to figure this out, I'm hoping I don't have to wait as long in the API design side of things.