IMS has a growing set of service-based specifications e.g. OneRoster, Competency and Academic Standards Exchange (CASE), etc. Service specifications describe both how the data is to be represented and how it is exchanged between systems/apps. IMS use a technology called OpenAPI when creating a specification that uses REST-based data exchange with JSON payloads. OpenAPI is a specification being developed and supported by the OpenAPI Initiative under the Linux Foundation. We use OpenAPI because it simplifies, considerably, rapid prototyping and early adoption of our service specifications.
Andy Miller, a Technical Architect at IMS, will explain why IMS use OpenAPI, how we make use of OpenAPI and how we document our use of OpenAPI. He will also demonstrate the use of the Swagger Toolkit which is an open source solution for working with OpenAPI. This is an excellent opportunity to understand how IMS’s use of OpenAPI makes it easy to implement our service-oriented specifications.
