Documentation of an API is the condition for clients like how they will communicate with the API. This is similar to the platform documentation that is made for conventional software projects. With no documentation it is basically not possible to integrate into an API and is definitely not useful.
There are various alternatives present for documenting APIs, each of them with their own advantages and disadvantages. There are three main categories of tooling such as general purpose documentation tool, code documentation tool and API documentation tool.
General purpose documentation tool involves things such as wikis and online joint document editors. The fence to entry is zero, which elucidates why these are so widespread. They are not perfect in that they are unorganized and in general missing entirety. They are also not specifically friendly in terms of appearance and routing for external clients.
Code documentation tool has conventionally been employed to document or file source code with markup that is then converted into citations or documentation. Illustrations include YARD or RDOC for Ruby, jsdoc for JavaScript or Javadoc for everything of Java. The advantage of these tools reclines in their skill to directly unite the API documentation to the cipher that integrates it. This assists in all very ordinary problems of revising the code and overlooking to renew the documentation. In addition, this approach can influence current infrastructure and know-how to allow developers to file or document APIs without discovering a latest tool. These advantages assist to get things initiated, but eventually this approach puts down much to be desired in terms of detaining semantic significance for the API descriptions.
API documentation tool is a series of languages and sustaining tools that are planned particularly for APIs. The majority languages provide image editors that help in making the particular layouts as well as tools that can turn into the specification as an interrelating API explorer. More sophisticated tools are accessible to involuntarily initiate API contemptuous services or to yield a scaffolding of the cipher that will eventually apply or use the API.
Trade-offs continues in terms of the level of coupling amid the above alternatives and the real source code integrating it. For instance, Ruby on Rails offers a very vigorous RESTful series of rules. Tools are present to reduce the pain, but the markup departs source code appearing busy with far-off too much non-source data in the files. Though, decoupling the file or documentation from the cipher totally comes out in double-documenting features of an API that can be simply found out (dynamically or statically) from the expansion framework of option. This is a theme to be visited again in the prospect.
Overall, as a group of people, the quicker we can go for third kind of documentation, the quicker we can further move ahead the technologies nearby API composition and incorporation set-up. If you or your company has yet to take benefit of the API documentation tool, then it is must to visit Socket.