Prism: a useful developer tool for OpenAPI specs
If your service exposes a HTTPS API, you may already be documenting it via an OpenAPI spec.
For instance, HSBC provides an OpenAPI spec (read: Swagger) for their Personal Credit Cards API (example).
At a previous career with a company that integrates with financial institutions, we developed the culture to describe our APIs with OpenAPI 3.0.
We had the case where our mobile frontend developers were building the UI features faster than our backend team can develop the API endpoints.
Because we agreed on an API contact using OpenAPI 3.0, we were able to provide mock backend servers for them to test with.
And we did it easily with Stoplight's Prism.
All we needed was to provide our OpenAPI spec, and we had a mock backend ready for our mobile frontend. This unblocked both teams, and we always can rely and refer on our API contract as our agreement terms.
Recently, I have been developing a Terraform Provider. Since the underlying cloud service has a HTTPS REST API, I was able to:
- Describe the underlying service's API as a OpenAPI spec
- Generate a Go client SDK based on this OPenAPI spec
- Mock the service with Prism for some quick acceptance tests
Prism does more than mocking; You can also use it to inspect any discrepancies between your API implementation and the API spec. You can find out more on their GitHub page: https://github.com/stoplightio/prism
Highly recommended for developers who use OpenAPI specs as contracts between components/services!