SmartBear Software, the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, released a major upgrade for SwaggerHub, the place for development teams to collaborate and coordinate the entire lifecycle of an API. With reusable components, new SwaggerHub Domains allows API designers to simplify API design, support larger API design teams, centrally manage APIs better and provide a consistent experience for consumers.

“APIs are core enablers of business transformation and now represent the go-to approach for integrating applications, services and micro-services across all forms of distributed IT architecture,” said Carl Lehmann, a Hybrid IT analyst with 451 Research. “Managing them requires lifecycle management tools like SwaggerHub Domains to assure their quality and efficiency of design and reuse.”

Many APIs across organizations or API developers’ portfolios share commonalities, including model definitions, parameters, responses and complete path definitions. The OpenAPI Specification Format allows generic referencing of shared components. SwaggerHub provides a simple, managed and secure mechanism to reference these shared components. Today, it has more than 3,800 APIs and is used by over 70 organizations.

SwaggerHub Domains answers user demands for better team support and management features. SwaggerHub users can now centrally manage both private and public components easily, along with features for publishing, versioning and synchronization with source control for teams of all sizes. As users design their APIs, the Swagger Editor auto-suggests reusable components from the system, making it both convenient and intuitive to leverage existing work.

“Modularizing API design is quickly becoming essential for faster, more consistent development,” said Tony Tam, VP of Products, Swagger at SmartBear. “There are, however, potentially huge pitfalls to having dependencies on different components, especially when one of them changes unexpectedly. SwaggerHub Domains has been designed to bring collaboration and consistency to redundant aspects of API design.”

With the rapid adoption of the Swagger Specification, which has been donated to the Open API Initiative under The Linux Foundation, more developers have been benefiting from the value of a contract-first API design. SwaggerHub was developed by members of the core Swagger development team with the goal of elevating the importance of design before coding and collaborating on the intent of the API.

As more users depend on common components, SwaggerHub’s versioning and publishing mechanism ensures that those dependencies are managed and always dependable. Its collaboration features offer easy access to Domains through both individual and team access controls. As a supported, advanced implementation of the OpenAPI Specification, existing tools can also take advantage of these modularized designs directly from SwaggerHub.

SwaggerHub Domains is available now with free and premium features. SwaggerHub now offers management for larger organization with new business-sized plans. For more information, visit: https://swaggerhub.com/.