WAPIml: Towards a Modeling Infrastructure for Web APIs

Web APIs are becoming key assets for any business. Most of these Web APIs are "REST-like", meaning that they adhere partially to the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style. The OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) was launched with the objective of creating a vendor neutral, portable, and open specification for describing REST APIs. The initiative has succeeded in attracting major companies and the OpenAPI specification has become de facto format for describing REST APIs. However, there is currently a lack of tools to provide modeling facilities for developers who want to manage and visualize their OpenAPI definitions as models and integrate them into model-based processes. In this paper, we propose WAPIml an OpenAPI round-trip tool that leverages model-driven techniques to create, visualize, manage, and generate OpenAPI definitions. WAPIml embeds an OpenAPI metamodel but also an OpenAPI UML profile to enable working with Web APIs in any UML-compatible modeling tool.