OpenAPI v3 is awesome compared to v2. It provides standards for how software programs communicate with each other.
OpenAPI has many benefits, including clear documentation, language-agnosticism, and wide adoption, which have contributed to its popularity in the developer community.
The parts that I loved:
- Easy to provide beautiful documentation on the APIs that reflects on a web portal for other developers to learn about the API offerings;
- Obtaining a schema for your API offerings that allows others to use it to easily integrate;
- Ability to provide multiple service endpoints for the APIs (for example the Clearnet / Web and Darkweb over Tor or I2P has different URLs and schemes);
- Eliminating the need for Postman or tools to experiment and test with the APIs. Swagger UI makes it possible for anyone to use the API to speedup the development process to use the APIs. This includes OAuth2 or API Key integrations;
- Once you have the OpenAPI schema you can run it through the Swagger Codegen to generate the code stubs needed to integrate to the APIs. This is a huge time saver!
I can go on writing more but the above is the main key points that appealed to me! To read more about OpenAPI you can visit: https://swagger.io/specification/