During this years meta::hack 3, I was extremely fortunate to work with Joel Berger on integrating/documenting OpenAPI with the MetaCPAN API via Mojolicious.

What is it?

OpenAPI is a specification for designing, documenting, validating and driving your RESTful API. It can be used to provide documentation to an existing API, or when creating a new one.

The OpenAPI Specification originated as the Swagger specification and was renamed to separate the API description format (OpenAPI) from the open source tooling (Swagger). The specification moved into a new GitHub repository, but did not change.

In the case of the MetaCPAN API, we set out to provide documentation to the existing API, but quickly moved into supporting validation to API calls as well.

Continue reading Day 7: MetaCPAN, Mojolicious and OpenAPI...

How to easily add a GraphQL interface to the public REST API of your Mojolicious application

During the Mojolicious 2017 Advent calendar series, we looked at how to build a public REST API using Mojolicious. A technology that is getting a lot of buzz is GraphQL. Now that it has been ported to Perl 5, what if there were an easy way to let people access your API using it?

Continue reading Mojolicious, OpenAPI - and GraphQL...

The OpenAPI Specification (formerly named Swagger) is an API description format for REST APIs. An API specification written using the the rules set by the Open API Initiative can be used to describe:

• All the available endpoints. An endpoint is a unique resource that can access or modify a given object.
• Input parameters, such as headers, query parameters and/or body parameters.
• The structure of the response, including headers status codes and the body - if any.
• Authentication methods
• Contact information, license, terms of use and other information

This post look into how to write an API specification and how to use it together with Mojolicious::Plugin::OpenAPI and OpenAPI::Client.

Continue reading Day 22: A RESTful API with OpenAPI...

One of my applications is a pure-JavaScript UI for a JSON API. This UI is an entirely different project that communicates with a public API using an OpenAPI specification.

Our public API is huge and complex: To set up the public API, I need a database, sample data, and three other private API servers that perform individual tasks as directed by the public API. Worse, I would need to set up a lot of different test scenarios with different kinds of data.

It would be a lot easier to set up a mock public API that I could use to test my UI, and it turns out that Mojolicious makes this very easy.

Continue reading Day 8: Mocking a REST API...