Akana Translates Between API Description Languages

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While application programming interfaces (APIs) have clearly become pervasive, there’s nothing all that simple about creating them. To help with the process, a number of modeling languages and tools have emerged. The trouble is that there has been something of a religious war going on over which modeling framework should be employed to design APIs.

To enable organizations to choose any modeling tool they like, Akana has announced that its API management platform now translates between the four primary description languages in use today: RESTful API Modelling Language (RAML), Swagger, Web Application Description Language (WADL) and Web Service Description Language (WSDL).

Via the Akana API Management platform, organizations can define, document and publish their API and then the platform automatically generates all the description language documents.

Rather than letting developers get caught up in a “holy war” between vendors, Sachin Agarwal, vice president of marketing for Akana, says IT organizations should be free to employ any modeling language  as they see fit. More often not, the use case of the API should dictate which modeling framework actually gets employed, says Agarwal.

Naturally, Akana is hoping that more organizations will opt to standardize on its API management platform if it supports multiple modeling tools. But Agarwal concedes it’s probable that other providers of API frameworks will similarly follow suit.

The only real issue should be figuring out how to enable developers to write as many APIs as possible to drive the growth of the API economy as a whole, while still providing IT operations teams with a way to manage and govern all the dependencies those APIs create.