Why are folks using Swagger or other tools for supposedly simple REST services at all? It's not like Swagger is a "standard" or something, and from the comments it appears using tooling for REST is a zero-sum game or even net loss.
I was engaged in a smallish project recently where they used Swagger as a shared resource that synced server dev with mobile dev. It didn't work that well, as you can imagine.. I had to wait for the server folks to update/fix Swagger docs all the time. They also thought that they need not tell me when a breaking change occurred, because "you will see it in Swagger anyway". So I pulled changes regularly, and generated iOS code, and suddenly it broke, and then I had to hope that one of the server team is currently available for consultation.
We started it using it for it's documentation and developer console generation ability at first, I have to say that I am much happier when I get given a swagger definition for an API, it lets me generate a client pretty much instantly and as long as the definition is written well it more often than not halves my integration time
I don't know if you're aware of the SOAP vs REST debate 10 years ago or Web Services vs CORBA before that. Client generation, or any code generation at all, was seen as a big no-no in the REST camp, so I find it ironic that today this is used as Swagger et. al.'s saving grace. What I frequently see is that inherently action-oriented protocols are crammed into resource-oriented REST facades, only without any formal interface descriptions at all, and without formal transactional or authorization semantics. OTOH, JSON REST services can't be used without browser-side glue code at all so the Web mismatch argument isn't working either. Makes you really wonder if there is any rationality or progress in middleware usage at all.
