Is there a standard language for defining HTTP APIs?

Question

For example, facebook and google have a lot of APIs, like getting data and doing actions on behalf of a user (backup files to Google Drive).

I can read all of their documentation but I usually like to keep it very technical. Documentation has a lot of unnecessary text :(

Is there a standard for querying a site's (server's) APIs?

I'd like to do something like https://google.com/apis (or https://facebook.com/apis), get a list of APIs and start invoking them. Is there such a standard? Who's in the industry implements it? Thanks.

Answer 1

There is Swagger. Its not a standard but it allows you to define simething very similar for your own APIs. You users can request /swagger.json and get a machine-readable definition of your API.

Answer 2

As @marstato pointed out: There is Swagger, which is at the moment something like a defacto standard for describing "restful" APIs. Swagger is so successfull, that there is now an OpenAPI Initiative which has some well known members, who are working on it.

Other players/solutions in this field are RAML, Apiary, APIBlueprint.

Then there are solutions like Django Restframework which have their own ideas.

Overall, there is bit movement in the market, though the idea is not new.

A good place to go is integrating the Swagger UI npm package in your project. It comes with an interactive Editor component which is a good starting point. This video shows you how to integrate it in your project. Zalando -yes the fashion company- has a nice guideline for REST-APIs. And if you are on the Python side of things, they have a really great Framework called connexion.