Documenting RESTful web APIs

Good API documentation improves the market adoption of APIs. The API documentation should be both human and machine readable. There are many tools available today for documenting RESTful web APIs. Some of the popular RESTful web API documentation tools are listed here for your quick reference:

  • WADL: This tool is an XML description of HTTP-based web applications such as RESTful web services. Not many vendors use WADL nowadays due to the emergence of more developer-friendly API documentation tools such as Swagger, RAML, and API Blueprint. To learn more about the WADL specification, visit http://www.w3.org/Submission/wadl.
  • RAML: This tool provides both human- and machine-readable formats (YAML) for describing APIs. This ...

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