Atlassian joins Open API Initiative, open sources RADAR doc generator

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Developers, Developers, Developers…

Atlassian was founded by developers building tools to cater to other developers with whom we’ve always had a close relationship. Very early on we opened our products up with a plugin system allowing others to build upon and extend them, which over time has grown into a large, thriving developer ecosystem that we’re very proud of.

APIs and Plugin Ecosystem

Opening a product to external developers requires well-designed, stable APIs that are thoroughly documented. The first plugins were JAR files directly injected into our Java products. To help developers debug, we opened up the source code and to this day all product licenses come with the full source code.

External integrations have been supported through XML-RPC, SOAP and eventually REST.

As cloud services gained momentum we built Atlassian Connect, an entirely web-based add-on system for cloud services, open to external developers.

APIs, and in particular REST, form the backbone of Atlassian’s developer ecosystem which in turn adds substantial value to our products.

Joining the Open API Initiative

REST gained popularity in part because of its simplicity, debuggability and ease of use, but its lack of a commonly accepted interface description standard has sometimes lead to inconsistent APIs and hampered code generation efforts for rapid client development across languages.

Over time, efforts like the Open API Initiative have emerged to address these limitations by defining a schema standard by which to describe REST APIs.

As a company we’re fostering an ecosystem whose success is related to the quality and usability of its REST APIs. This means we and our external developers have a lot to gain from an open, successful and widely-accepted definition language for REST APIs. We’ve committed ourselves to actively contributing to the standard by becoming an OAI and Linux Foundation member organization, alongside industry leaders like Google, Microsoft, PayPal and others.

We’re really excited to have Atlassian on board. For a technology standard to be successful and see broad adoption, it needs to address the industry’s issues and involving its key players I think is a condition for achieving this. Atlassian’s focus on interoperability and long history of successfully opening up its products through APIs is a huge boon for us and will contribute to an even stronger specification.

Tony Tam, founder of Swagger, the foundation for the Open API Specification

Open Sourcing RADAR: Our API Documentation Generator

One of the things the Open API Specification facilitates is the ability to have API documentation automatically generated. As we add Open API support to our products, we’ll use it to replace our existing, hand-crafted API documentation.

For this we’ve built a custom site generator, RADAR, for Open API specs to host our API documentation. Built on React, it offers searching, browsing and viewing REST documentation for any product and any version of that product. RADAR is a straight implementation of the current version of the Open API specification, not tied to any of our own products. Because of this, RADAR can be used by any Open API provider.

Hosted by the Linux Foundation, the Open API members do great work both promoting and actively developing vendor-neutral open source tooling around the specification. With RADAR we’re following this model and so we are making it available to the community under the Apache 2 license.

Like so many others in our industry, Atlassian relies on a tremendous amount of open source software. In return, it has traditionally made many of its products freely available to our community and develops core parts of its products like its plugin infrastructure as open source.

We’re thrilled when the industry acknowledges the important role of open source in ways like this, and takes responsibility by contributing back. As such, we’re very happy to work with Atlassian as a new member organization of The Linux Foundation.

Mike Woster, chief operating officer, The Linux Foundation

We are committed to continuing its development and are keen to welcome external contributors. The project is hosted at: https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/radar