Hello Community!

Postman has returned to GSoC as a mentoring org, and — given the project gets selected — I will be mentoring the OpenAPI Web Search (OAWS) project that makes finding Swagger & OpenAPI definitions easier and faster! In this blog post, I will talk about the same.

Looking forward to engaging with the developers from the API-first world for a happy summer of coding! ❤️

Are you tired of sifting through endless documentation and struggling to find the Swagger or OpenAPI definitions you need for your project? Keep reading to learn more about how are we going to simplify your workflow and boost your productivity.

As web search technology advances and more APIs are created, developers must have access to the best tools available. There should be a fast and reliable way to find Swagger/OpenAPI definitions quickly and easily. If you're not familiar with Swagger and OpenAPI, it's a language-agnostic specification for describing RESTful APIs. The API definition describes the endpoints, parameters, and responses for each operation in the API. It's a valuable resource for developers who are building integrations with third-party APIs.

In addition to being able to search across public APIs with ease, developers in the API-first world should have access to the endless information buried in the sea of APIs. With similar goals, the Postman Open Technologies team manages a knowledge base dedicated to mining and extracting knowledge from the API universe. To expand the current knowledge base, we came up with the idea of OpenAPI Web Search—a project for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2023.

OpenAPI Web Search: Revolutionizing the Way Developers find API Definitions 🚀

OpenAPI Web Search (OAWS) project is all about building a search engine for finding Swagger and OpenAPI definitions on the open web—mostly from lesser-known sources. OAWS indexes APIs from various public sources and makes them searchable by keyword, provider, and other metadata. This will let you say goodbye to the frustration of sifting through endless documentation and hello to streamlined efficiency in finding APIs for your use cases.

The dataset powering OAWS can later be used to analyze the specifications to obtain insights into some of the practices common among APIs.

➥ Learn more.

Become a GSoC contributor

If you're interested in contributing to OpenAPI Web Search (OAWS), get started here.

• Here's the official repository for OpenAPI Web Search.

• Check out a good first issue.

• Find detailed instructions for submitting the proposal here.

• Take a look at this—a TL;DR for GSoC contributors.

Join Postman at GSoC'23

You can also look into other ideas and join Postman at GSoC'23. I'm looking forward to engaging with you for a happy summer of coding! Kindly submit your proposal by April 4, 2023, at 11:00 am (PDT) / 11:30 pm (IST).