Connecting API's and front-end applications through OpenAPI auto generation

Communication between an API and client-side applications has posed several challenges. The back-end developers might break backwards compatibility or forget to correctly specify required and optional fields.

For model-view-controller (MVC) applications in which the data structures passed from and to a BE application are very explicit, documentation can already be auto-generated.

It is a comprehensive specification that describes a REST api using JSON or XML format. It has been widely used for more than a decade.

After exploring different tools, we opted for OpenAPI Generator to generate the client side sdk from our OpenApi specification.

Efficient knowledge-sharing between FE and BE is crucial to develop high-quality software. Therefore, we always try to document our API and leverage tooling to keep the API documentation up-to-date.