OpenAPItoUML: A Tool to Generate UML Models from OpenAPI Definitions

REpresentational State Transfer (REST) has become the prominent architectural style for designing Web APIs. This increasing adoption has triggered the creation of languages to formally describe REST APIs, thus facilitating and promoting their usage. In particular, a consortium of companies has created the OpenAPI Initiative, which aims at creating a vendor neutral, portable, standard and open specification for describing REST APIs. OpenAPI specification has become the choice of reference for describing REST APIs, and its adopters can benefit from a plethora of tools for documenting, developing and integrating REST APIs. However, current documentation tools for OpenAPI only describe REST APIs in HTML pages using text and code samples, thus requiring a considerable effort to visualize and understand what the APIs offer. In this paper, we propose a tool called OpenAPItoUML, which generates UML models from OpenAPI definitions, thus offering a better visualization of the data model and operations of REST APIs.