Software development solutions provider SmartBear has announced a new version of its API design and documentation tool, SwaggerHub, incorporating open-source tools from Stoplight, the API design-first company acquired by SmartBear last August. This integration aims to enhance the customer experience, enabling development teams to create higher quality, more reliable, and easily adoptable APIs. The move is part of an ongoing initiative to create a comprehensive and composable API development hub, providing visibility, automation, and productivity for teams modernising their API practices.
Sean Butler, Vice President of Product Management at SmartBear, said, "SmartBear’s mission is to empower customers with the solutions and capabilities they need to drive quality and efficiency across development teams. Integrating Stoplight's advanced API design features into SwaggerHub highlights this commitment to enhance the API development lifecycle, particularly critical now with the onslaught of AI-related APIs. Customers can expect multiple benefits, including a seamless developer experience from API design to deployment.”
Stoplight's Spectral is now integrated into SwaggerHub, with Stoplight's visual editor due to be integrated soon. This approach enhances API design and governance with advanced linting, style guide enforcement, and a user-friendly design interface. It ensures API designs meet best practices and organisational standards from the outset while enjoying the benefits of an easy-to-use visual editing tool. By supporting the maintenance of high-quality APIs that are simple to manage and evolve, this integration optimises the API design process, increases consistency across the API portfolio, and significantly reduces errors.
Mark Boyd, Director of Platformable, noted: “Spectral has fast become a core tool supporting API design and API governance best practices. It reduces security risks and accelerates development through automation, allowing APIs to generate value for a business faster. It’s commendable of SmartBear to integrate this open source tooling into their API Hub. This support for interoperability allows users to maintain their toolchain without feeling locked into proprietary approaches to API governance.”
To improve the flexibility and user experience of API documentation, SwaggerHub Portal now includes Elements. Users can choose to render their OpenAPI definitions using either the open-source option, Elements or SwaggerUI. This enhanced documentation leads to increased API adoption rates, fostering a more vibrant ecosystem around API offerings.
Later this year, SwaggerHub Explore will also include Prism, enhancing API reliability and consistency through advanced mocking capabilities. Developers will be able to create mock servers instantly based on their API definitions, promoting parallel development workflows that dramatically reduce time-to-market for new features. Validation against OpenAPI specifications further enhances API quality.
SmartBear is realigning 20+ products into three solution hubs this year: API Hub, Test Hub, and Insight Hub, to simplify the customer experience. API Hub, through seamless integration of robust API tools like SwaggerHub, will equip development teams to efficiently deliver high-quality APIs at scale.