MuleSoft, a provider of integration platforms, released developer tooling for RAML (RESTful API Modeling Language), an expressive language for specifying APIs. By offering the tooling as a free service available on APIhub as well as an open source download at RAML.org, MuleSoft intends to enable any developer to build REST APIs that foster a standard, design-first approach.
RAML is the first standard facilitating the design-first approach to APIs. The language captures the simplicity of HTTP – the basis for the Web – and is programming language agnostic. MuleSoft’s tools expose the underlying value of RAML throughout the entire lifecycle of an API, from designing and building to evaluating and integrating.
"APIs are taking over the world. However, chaos and confusion are still prevalent without design standards for consistency and reuse,” said Uri Sarid, CTO at MuleSoft. “This leads to huge variability in quality, friction for the developers and wildly uncertain API initiatives for enterprises. We believe that an open, simple and succinct spec for describing APIs, that captures their structure and fosters pattern-based design and reuse, will help unlock the potential of the API economy. RAML is the right candidate to do exactly that and we see the potential for it to garner broad adoption – even now we're seeing others in the ecosystem rallying around RAML."
The new MuleSoft tooling includes API Designer: a modern, web-based, intuitive development tool that guides users through the API design process with RAML and builds a live, visual representation of an API on the fly. MuleSoft is also offering an API Console which provides a graphical representation of a RAML-documented API that visually exposes API structure and important patterns while providing access to static and interactive API documentation. Another new tool, API Notebook, is a live, web-based, persistent JavaScript console that helps developers explore and live test APIs, mashups, and use cases in the browser and save them for later.
More information is available at www.mulesoft.com.
More information on RAML, can be found at http://raml.org.