A practical format

APIs design by using RAML

RESTfull API Modeling Language or short RAML, is a language based on YAML that provides an easy way to design, maintain, reuse and share your APIs. Its most valuable side is that it can be used not only to describe APIs, but also to model them.

To make life even more easy, Mulesoft came up with tools known as the API Designer, the API Console, the API Workbench and the API Notebook. By creating your RAML API definition, you can test your calls while you do it. It helps a lot and eliminates a probability of an error.

Since it is based on YAML, it is quite readable to people with no technical knowledge. Therefore, some project managers use it as well, as much as anyone else, who learns its syntax.

A very useful feature of Anypoint Studio is that you can import an API specification from a RAML into your project. Those specifications can be written in RAML 0.8 or RAML 1.0, but you can also use OpenAPI specification (OAS). You can define data, annotation and resource types, security schemes, traits, various libraries, and even examples of response.