API documentation is the information that is required to successfully consume and integrate with an API. This can be in the form of technical writing, code samples, and examples for better understanding how to consume an API. 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.
How Swagger Helps with API Documentation
Swagger defines an API’s RESTful 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. Swagger helps define a language agnostic, human readable format for APIs, that eases implementation, drives adoption, and stabilizes development. Since its creation, Swagger has become the world’s most popular framework for API development, with over one million monthly downloads of the open source Swagger tools, and has evolved into the industry standard for designing and documenting RESTful APIs.
Adding Swagger to Your APIs
There are a number of approaches development teams take to add Swagger to their APIs. And because Swagger is supported by an expansive developer community, each of these methods is also supported by a number of open source and commercial tools. In this free eBook download, we look at two of the most prominently used methods: Swagger generation during run time and Swagger generation during build time, and provide an introduction to some of the tools available to support these approaches. You can download the eBook as a PDF by clicking the link below. Download: Documenting An Existing API with Swagger You can also read the eBook by flipping through the SlideShare presentation at the bottom of the page.
Want more resources like this?
A few times a month, we send out an email with our latest API resources. Use the signup form to the right to join!