The document discusses various API description languages such as Swagger and RAML, highlighting their evolution and features. It introduces the Refract project, which offers a recursive data structure for representing complex data and metadata in API descriptions. The goal is to simplify API usage and provide straightforward querying capabilities across different API description formats.

1. API Description
Languages

2. Swagger 0.8 API Blueprint
RAML
Swagger 1.2
Swagger 2.0RADL
“That Microsoft Thing”
Google API Discovery Protocol
Brief History of Time

3. Experimentation is good

4. Lang 1
AST
awesomeness
parse
use
Usage

5. Usage
Lang 1
AST
awesomeness
parse
use
Lang 2
parse
AST
use

6. UsageLang 1
AST
data model
parse
normalize
Lang 2
parse
AST
normalize
awesomeness
use

7. This is happening all over
Most don’t bother

8. Solution!

9. abstraction

10. https://github.com/refractproject

11. https://github.com/refractproject
recursive data structure for expressing
complex structures, relationships, and metadata.
Refract
A library for interacting with Refract elementsMinim

12. https://github.com/refractproject/refract-spec
"foobar"
{
"element": "string"
"content": “foobar",
"meta": {},
"attributes": {}
}

13. https://github.com/refractproject/refract-spec

14. https://github.com/refractproject/minim
Easy querying of refracted data
let namespace = minim.namespace()
.use(apiDescription);
let api = namespace.fromCompactRefract(…);

15. Goal
Abstract away 90% usecases
Provide easy querying on all API Desc Langs