Swagger Framework vs API Blueprint and Automated Tools

Both API Blueprint and Swagger allow you to describe a broad set of API architectures with a design-first approach.

• Swagger comes with tools to generate a description from code.
• API Blueprint syntax makes it easier to describe hypermedia/REST APIs.

API Blueprint and Swagger UI are primarily classified as “API” and “Documentation as a Service &” tools respectively.

What is API Blueprint?

A powerful high-level API design language for web APIs. API Blueprint is simple and accessible to everybody involved in the API lifecycle. With API Blueprint you can quickly design and prototype APIs to be created or document and test already deployed mission-critical APIs. The goal of the API Blueprint format is to enable the design-first philosophy for REST APIs, however, the format works just as well for documenting existing APIs.

API Blueprint comes with a syntax close to Markdown, MSON and full support of all Apiary tooling and open-source tooling and thus, its syntax is concise yet expressive. Markdown is a lightweight text formatting syntax. MSON is an extension of Markdown for describing data objects.

What is Swagger UI?

Swagger allows you to describe the structure of your APIs so that machines can read them. The ability of APIs to describe their own structure is the root of all awesomeness in Swagger. Swagger can also automatically generate client libraries for your API in many languages and explore other possibilities like automated testing. There are a few ways in which Swagger can help drive your API development further:

• Design-first users: use Swagger Codegen to generate a server stub for your API. The only thing left is to implement the server logic – and your API is ready to go live!
• Use Swagger Codegen to generate client libraries for your API in over 40 languages.
• Use Swagger UI to generate interactive API documentation that lets your users try out the API calls directly in the browser.
• Use the spec to connect API-related tools to your API. For example, import the spec to SoapUI to create automated tests for your API.
• And more! Check out the open-source and commercial tools that integrate with Swagger.

Automated API Blueprint / Swagger Designer for Visual API Modeling

Looking for an API designer that helps? Our API design tool enables you to design, describe and document RESTful API in a total graphical way. You can design RESTful API easily by creating a simple Class Diagram, like the one below. The graphical design approach, along with our award-winning diagramming interface makes API design simple, straight-forward and error-free.

Generate Swagger / API Blueprint formatted API

Without writing a single line of code, an API designer can generate the complete API definition in accordance with the Swagger 2 or API Blueprint specification. The API details all of its resources and operations based totally on your visual API design.

Generate interactive API documentation

Generate beautiful, interactive API documentation that allows your development team and end consumers to easily get started with your API resources. The visual API documentation makes it easy both for back-end development and client-side consumption.