OpenAPI Bot: A Chatbot to Help You Understand REST APIs

摘要

REST APIs are an essential building block in many Web applications. The lack of a standard machine-readable format to describe these REST APIs triggered the creation of several specification languages to formally define REST APIs, with the OpenAPI specification currently taking the lead. OpenAPI definitions are consumed by a growing ecosystem of tools aimed at automating tasks such as generating server/client SDKs and API documentations. However, current OpenAPI documentation tools mostly provide simple descriptive Web pages enumerating all the API operations and corresponding parameters, but do not offer interactive capabilities to help navigate the API and ask relevant information. Therefore, learning how to use an API and how its different parts are interrelated still requires a considerable time investment. To overcome this situation we present our OpenAPI Bot, a chatbot able to read an OpenAPI definition for you and answer the questions you may have about it.