Writing API documentation is a nightmare for API writers, and API documentation is usually written by API developers. Due to the cumbersome creation of API documents, the content that needs to be recorded is relatively wide. After completing the API development tasks, the API documents must be carefully written, which brings additional workload to the developers.
With the increasing demand, the birth of tools makes the connection between API development and API documentation closer. For example: Swagger, Eolinker, APIdoc, Easydoc, etc. These API document management tools can not only generate beautiful online API documents, but also support integration into the project to automatically generate API documents.
Take Eolinker as an example. Eolinker provides users with the tool's OpenAPI, which is convenient for users to integrate into the development system. After the completion of each API development, quickly call OpenAPI and automatically generate API documentation.
Of course, OpenAPI is not only as simple as automatically adding API documents, Eolinker also provides OpenAPI that can quickly operate the system, which can be integrated into Jenkins and other integration tools. With these OpenAPIs, users can use them to make the entire development process more "smooth", for example, when the development is completed, the OpenAPI is triggered for testing.
OpenAPI is just one of the implementation methods, and some tools are integrated into the development system through configuration files using dependencies. For example, Swagger2 is the API document generated in this way, and the interface of Swagger2 to generate the API is also beautiful and simple.
The team can choose the appropriate API documentation tool according to the project requirements. If only the API documentation is required, the four tools mentioned in this article (Swagger, Eolinker, APIdoc, and Easydoc) are all good choices. If you consider that the project needs to optimize the entire API development process and use tools for integration, you can choose some powerful API management tools (Eolinker, APIdoc, etc.) that are easy to integrate into the project. Demo tool: www.eolinker.com