How do I make a good API documentation?

What is API Blueprint?

API Blueprint is a simple language for describing the structure of web services and APIs.

It's structured like HTML with a few differences. The main differences are that (a) API specs can include media types; and (b) it supports the concept of nesting (hierarchies). Media types are just data structures, but nesting refers to the relationships between objects.

In JSON, all data are flattened and unrelated to each other. So "user" does not necessarily mean it's related to an "account" that is related to an "organization". By contrast, in API Blueprint, you can nest any level deep or to arbitrary depth. For example, the following JSON:

The following API Blueprint can be rendered as similar markup: There are also many new features like the ability to define media types and response conditions like headers, success, failure, redirect, etc. Check out the API Blueprint documentation for more information.

You may wonder why you should care about API Blueprint when there are tools like Swagger2, RAML, etc. There are two reasons: API Blueprint is still much faster than other XML-based languages for authoring API specs. The spec is human-readable, therefore humans still read them. In other words, they are still meant to be self-documenting. The alternative is a machine-readable spec that is easier to parse.

For example, take a look at this API Blueprint generated spec for a Google Docs API: As we can see, there are some basic errors. However, when we look at this spec file: You will notice that the spec file is much more structured, readable, and organized. So what does API Blueprint look like? To show you, I've implemented a REST API service in Node using Express and Koa, which generates the above example of an API Blueprint. And here is the entire source code for generating an API Blueprint (including my tests).

Note that a spec file is pretty small - just a few lines of code. It can be generated by writing a series of template strings into a template file. After that, I'm not sure if there is much to improve in the way of generating the spec file. As it stands, the spec is readable and structured. That being said, I would be curious to see if other services might generate API Blueprint out of the box.

How do I make a good API documentation?

I've been asked by clients why the documentation of their API is poor, and to be honest it bugs me a lot.

This is what some of my favorite code examples look like: That looks absolutely terrible to me! A good API documentation should present how to use the API and how to write functions. It also is important to include examples in the documentation as it can often give you an idea on how to write code (if you know how to read comments). And don't forget the links to your projects with tests and so on. Now back to my point. After a long search for best practices I found out that you must do the following things when creating your API documentation: Be clear on what an API documentation is supposed to do! Do your own research on best practices when writing the documentation. Don't use third party material (it's the worst thing you can do when writing API docs). If you can show your readers how the code in the documentation would look like, then you're ahead of the game! (But if you have a choice, use an example from code!). And last but not least always have an example of the documentation on this GitHub repository or on the Readme.md on your GitHub project and always link to those resources! But more importantly. There are two main different aspects to keep in mind while writing your API documentation: How is the documentation for the API supposed to work? How do you write the documentation in order to reach the above said expectations? This leads us to the first topic: How do you build an API documentation? Well, at Elastic there's a couple of ways you could achieve that: API Explorer : this gives a little intro and can be useful if you don't know much about what an API is. Intro : this gives a little intro and can be useful if you don't know much about what an API is.md : This is just a standard Readme.

What is an API documentation?

A documentation of a software is a document that explains what each function or class does.

It's a sort of step-by-step process explanation, so users can easily understand how to use it.

The API documentation is a documentation of an API, and it's also a good practice for documentation. What is an API? API stands for Application Programming Interface, which is the set of rules that developers must follow in order to communicate with a certain system. An API is a set of functions, classes or variables that a user can use to communicate with a specific software. An API documentation is a type of documentation that illustrates how to use those functions, classes or variables. It will help developers to use the API, or any other kind of documentation is a documentation of an API. In this tutorial, we will explain the differences between the API documentation and the API itself, so we can better understand the concepts. Note: If you have any questions regarding to APIs, feel free to contact us. We are always ready to help you! Let's start! In this tutorial, we will focus on the API documentation for Java. For more, check out this video: Difference between API documentation and API itself. So far, we have a clear definition of . Now, let's see what is an API itself.

An API is a set of rules for using a system. Usually, when someone uses an API, they should know how to call that API and how to use its methods. This means that, the first thing to know about an API is how to call it and how to use its methods. API documentation contains all the information needed to call the API, such as the methods, parameters, arguments, etc. An API documentation must also contain all the information about how to use the API. In short, the API documentation is a documentation of the API. If you have any questions regarding this topic, feel free to contact us. What do we need to use the API? The first thing to know about the API is what you need to use it.

What is the difference between API Blueprint and open API?

Both API Blueprint and open API are XML based language for describing API.

They both try to solve same problem (describing RESTful API in simple language) but provide different ways to do it. While API Blueprint is geared towards client developers/consumers, open API is aimed at server developers/providers. The way they describe an API is very different. In this post I will be focusing on open API, because I think it has much more value.

Both API Blueprint and open API is described in XML language. But the actual content that you create with them looks entirely different. In the next couple of sections, we will see how these XML based languages can solve the same problem. I am writing this blog post to explain the differences so you can better differentiate between both tools and can make a choice which one to use.

What is API Blueprint? API Blueprint, released by Bluemix is simple, lightweight tool which helps write declarative descriptions of your RESTful API. It does have many built-in elements like URIs, Headers, Responses, Error responses and status codes, Swagger support, etc. When you start with API Blueprint, you first add your resources and the actions. An example resource could look like:

The way you define your resources in this language is simple. You just add Resources element in the root document and then list all resources you would want to expose in this section. You name each resource using URI Template pattern of your choice. You can also add the attributes of each resource you want to expose. Example resources could look like:

This simple approach has its own set of limitations though. First and foremost is that you can only describe what you can see at the time. For instance, if you add new actions to this resource without changing the name of the resource, you won't be able to reference it anymore and your changes won't show up in the documentation you generate. Another limitation of the approach is that it cannot describe resources or actions that don't use REST. For instance, in my example, we used the application/x-www-form-urlencoded form encoding for our POST requests and not the usual application/json. This limits the kind of resources which can be described. Another limitation is that there is no native support for OAuth in API Blueprint.