During my monitoring of the API space this last week I had one of those rare discoveries, amongst thousands of misses, and around a hundred slightly interesting nuggets, a simple move forward called Lucybot emerges. 

I want to walk you through what I experienced as I had the tab open in my Chrome browser for the last week, in Lucybot's own words:

LucyBot is a tool for on-boarding new API developers, and is meant to be used alongside traditional API documentation such as Swagger and I/O Docs. 

I really like this sentence when they start talking about generating API cookbooks:

LucyBot generates cross-language cookbooks for any REST API.  Design step-by-step walk-throughs for any use case, and LucyBot will provide cross-language code snippets, which expand into a working, visually-rich demo. 

Now you are talking my language.  Swagger on Github is a powerful combo:

LucyBot can also push the code to GitHub, where users are free to build it out further, e.g. by pulling in data from their own servers or other APIs. 

Add some API Blueprint to the mix, and now you have some serious API coverage.  It can be difficult to understand the vision behind a new API driven start-up—I look at quite a few new companies.  To help move the process forward, let’s start with the basics of what is significant about Lucynbot’s perspective n API.  There are two things that stand out for me:

Learning About APIs - Lucybot takes an API definition like Swagger, and turns it into an interactive walk-through for on-boarding with an API.  Think Swagger UI, but more interactive walk-through than interactive documentation--now add in a little Swagger driven Codecademy to help you authenticate, and navigate the request and response of each API. # Boom

API Driven Clients - Lucybot isn't just generating interactive documentation or walk-throughs, they are generating a single page application (SPA).  Another move forward in how we learn about valuable API driven resources, how we on-board them, and how we engage with them, all in a single, fluid, API definition driven motion. 

I have to admit, after exploring my thoughts around API visualization using Swagger from Chris, and seeing what is possible in generating “API Cookbooks”, and Single Page Apps (SPA), with Lucybot, I’m about to go into cardiac failure from the movement in the space over the last week.  I’m excited about what Lucybot brings to the table.  I haven’t even used their offering, but I can see the potential, and when you line up with the other movement in the API definition world around visualization, and the addition of hypermedia using API Blueprint, I can begin to see some of one possible future I’ve been imagining for the API Economy. 

I am excited to see what Lucybot can deliver when it comes to cookbooks and SPAs.  If they can deliver on the vision they are bringing to the table, it could further move the overall client and integration side of the API conversation forward pretty significantly.  I’m seeing many of the important elements of delivering API and microservices coming together in 2015, and Lucybot reflects this.  Adding yet another bonus incentive for creating machine readable API definitions using Swagger and API Blueprint to the API game.