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Open-sourced the API editor of my upcoming product

Hello hackers :)

I'm working on my next product which is a collaborative API platform. The idea initially came from my daily works, I was working in a consulting agency that design & build apps for large companies like Nike, Starbucks, Burberry, etc.

Just like other digital teams, we use tools like GitHub, Jira, Figma to manage everything and work together. But as a backend dev, I found the management for the API is chaotic, we use websequencediagrams to draw sequence diagram, using lucidchart to draw some logic diagram and frontend colleagues have to use swagger-editor to check backend's API doc.

We don't have an all-in-one platform to manage everything in the backend. With the project going and become more complicated, it becomes hard for team members to review the logic designing behind each API, which is quite important for those performance-critical APIs. On the other hand, backend devs have to use Slack to notify the frontend team which API has just been changed.

So I started to build a collaborative API platform aim at bringing frontend & backend teams to work together in one place. The product is going to be released in the next month and I just open-sourced the openAPI editor of the product, it might help if you are looking for an alternative of swagger-editor.

Github: https://github.com/chilllab/comet

Happy creating :)

  1. 2

    Interesting idea, but there are a some issues with this. Most notibly, you almost always want to define your API based on what is supported, so close coupling with the service API is required. Most languages already support dynamically generated APIs, so this wouldn't be of much use.

    As far as the explorer, part, there are tons out there, that have quite a lot of functionality (ignore swagger ui because the UX there is just terrible)

    1. 1

      Thanks for your reply :)

      My plan actually is a platform for API management. In other words, I care how you design the API, not a doc that displaying all the APIs.
      From my experience, when working on a big project with a large team, we have all kinds of design documents behind each API (sequence diagram, model relationship, etc), I wanna link them together.
      My previous team actually is using Loopback, sth like you said, a framework that can generate openAPI doc automatically, but we were not building simple CRUD APIs, so it doesn't work in most cases.

      For the explorer, I open-sourced it because I think some people just wanna use a free tool to check openAPI doc online(easily copy-paste the doc and check, like how they use the swagger-ui), I didn't find a good one from the list above, maybe I missed. Anyway, I will compete with them :)

      Thanks for your replay again

  2. 1

    Nice work I like it!

    1. 1

      Good to hear you like it :)

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