Swagger#
28 July 2022
swagger
(noun) A very confident and arrogant or self-important gait or manner. [1]
Origin#
Early 16th century, apparently a frequentative of the verb swag.
Example#
What hempen home-spuns have we swagg’ring here,
So near the cradle of the Fairy Queen?
What, a play toward? I’ll be an auditor,
An actor too perhaps, if I see cause.
– Shakespeare, William. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.
Notes#
The original sense (early 16th century) of the verb swag, which today means ‘hang heavily’ or ‘sway from side to side’, was ‘cause to sway or sag’. If you were to close your eyes and visualise someone coming towards you swaying from side to side, their clothes hanging in heavy folds down their sides, your mind might immediately jump to a word, waddle. Walking like a duck or penguin, wings droop-flapping down their sides. Waddle.
In the early 2000s, there was this language called waddle.
This specification describes the Web Application Description Language (WADL). An increasing number of Web-based enterprises (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Flickr to name but a few) are developing HTTP-based applications that provide programatic access to their internal data. Typically these applications are described using textual documentation that is sometimes supplemented with more formal specifications such as XML schema for XML-based data formats. WADL is designed to provide a machine process-able description of such HTTP-based Web applications. [2]
Does that not remind you of something else? Of REST web services?
Well, in the early 2000s, a coder, working on a dictionary project [3], created a JSON structure to simplify the interaction between the several tools their group was using. They wanted a name for this JSON structure. There already existed WADL, so they thought they’ll name their language Swagger.
And that, children, is how the OpenAPI Specification was born. With a bit of a waddle and a swagger. [4]