![]() ![]() Team-based tools like SwaggerHub allow collaboration on the API's documentation and host them for internal consumption. You can visualize all of our internal APIs so that developers could use upstream and downstream services quickly and easily. Help internal team members understand the API and agree on its attributes: An API definition allows documentation tools like the Swagger UI to visualize APIs.Generating documentation for your API is just one of the advantages of defining your API with OpenAPI. Using a tool like Swagger UI - either open source or within the SwaggerHub platform - you can convert your OAS contract into an interactive API console that consumers can use to interact with the API and quickly learn how the API is supposed to behave. One of the biggest reasons why Swagger first gained adoption, was its ability to help streamline the documentation for RESTful APIs. Web services defined with OAS can communicate with each other irrespective of the language they’re built in, since OAS is language agnostic and machine readable. The OAS contract describes what the API does, it’s request parameters and response objects, all without any indication of code implementation. This contract is language agnostic and human readable, allowing both machines and humans to parse and understand what the API is supposed to do. OAS defines an API’s contract, allowing all the API’s stakeholders, be it your development team, or your end consumers, to understand what the API does and interact with its various resources, without having to integrate it into their own application. This is meant to reference the Specification.) (Note: We will be using the term OpenAPI and OAS throughout this resource. The Swagger Specification, which was renamed to the OpenAPI Specification (OAS), after the Swagger team joined SmartBear and the specification was donated to the OpenAPI Initiative in 2015, has become the de factor standard for defining RESTful APIs. In the next section, we’ll take a closer look at how the OpenAPI Specification (formerly known as the Swagger Specification) can help address your documentation challenges. These challenges, along with other API pain points, led to the creation of the Swagger Specification. Regular API interfaces, be it text documentation, or others like Javadocs, do not allow them to communicate with each other. API documentation can be thought of as the interface for consuming an API, and such, needs to facilitate interaction between these different web services. Applications are made up of multiple services that constantly communicate and interact with each other.Īs RESTful services grow in number, so do the programming languages that are used to implement them, making it harder for them to communicate. The second issue is facilitating interaction between multiple web services. pdf, to provide documentation to your end consumers. This is especially true if you’re using static documents, like a. Maintaining and updating this documentation for your development team and end consumers, so they work with the API efficiently, becomes a difficult process. Challenges of API documentationĪPIs, like so many other products, tend to evolve rapidly during development and release cycles. ![]() Documentation is part of the overall user experience, and is one of the biggest factors for increased API growth and usage. Good documentation accelerates development and consumption, and reduces the money and time that would otherwise be spent answering support calls. Why documentation mattersĪ survey by ProgrammableWeb found that API consumers consider complete and accurate documentation as the biggest factor in their API decision making, even outweighing price and API performance. Concise and clear documentation - which allows your API consumers to adopt it into their application quickly - is no longer optional for organizations that want to drive adoption of their APIs. This can be in the form of technical writing, code samples and examples for better understanding how to consume an API. With a lot of web services emerging, the need to have clear API documentation for adopting these services became clear.ĪPI documentation is the information that is required to successfully consume and integrate with an API. Since the advent of mobile and cloud computing, APIs have gone mainstream, with more and more companies and organizations understanding the business value of creating APIs. The better the interface that’s used to consume APIs, the higher the chance of achieving your business and technological objectives. Good user experience is key to using any product, and the same holds true for APIs.
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