Spring REST Docs was released recently and the documentation says:
This approach frees you from the limitations imposed by tools like Swagger
So, I wanted to ask when Spring REST Docs is preferable to use comparing to Swagger and which limitations it frees.
I just saw a presentation here that touches on your question among other topics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5ncCJBarRI&t=26m58s
Swagger doesn't support hypermedia at all / it's URI centric
Swagger's method of inspecting your code can lag behind your code. It's possible make a change in your code that Swagger fails to understand and won't process properly until Swagger gets updated.
Swagger requires lot of annotation, and it's painful to include the descriptive text you want in an api document in annotations.
There are just some things that Swagger can't figure out from inspecting your code.
In any case, these are just a couple of points. The presenter does a much better job discussing it than I could.
I thought I would chime in to give a little bit more context surrounding Swagger, what it is, and what it is not. I believe this might help answer your question.
Swagger 2.0 is being adopted by a lot of big names and big platforms like Microsoft Azure, Paypal, SwaggerHub.com, DynamicApis.com, etc... Something to keep in mind is that Swagger is very simply a specification. It is not a framework. There are a lot of frameworks out there built to generate Swagger output that crawl through your code looking at your API information in order to build the Swagger 2.0 JSON file that represents your API. The Swagger UI that you see your APIs on is driven directly from this Swagger 2.0 JSON file. fiddler it to check it out
It is important to note that a framework that was created to allow you to "use swagger" is not how Swagger has to work (i.e. it is completely up to the implementation of the 3rd party framework). If the framework you are using to generate your Swagger 2.0 documents and UI is not working for you then you should be able to go find another framework that generates the Swagger artifacts and swap the technologies out.
Hope this helps.
From Spring REST docs:
The aim of Spring REST Docs is to help you to produce documentation for your RESTful services that is accurate and readable
This test-driven approach helps to guarantee the accuracy of your service’s documentation. If a snippet is incorrect the test that produces it will fail.
Spring REST docs advantages:
Documentation is written in the test code so it does not overload main code with lots of annotations and descriptions
Generated docs and examples are accurate because related test must pass
Docs can provide more specific and descriptive snippets
Format is suitable for publishing
Spring REST docs disadvantages:
Requires more work
Documentation provides request/response examples but don't provide interactive tools to modify and try out requests
Swagger advantages:
Quick, automated generation from a code
Interactive request execution - can be used for acceptance testing
Built around the OpenAPI Specification
Swagger disadvantages:
For more descriptive documentation it will require a lot of annotations
Tests are not related to the documentation so sometimes documention may deviate from reality
There is some limitation with swagger and the specific spring stack.
For example : with "param" in your Request Mapping you can define more than one method with the same url ans so simplify your code.
But swagger show you just one method
One disadvantage with Swagger is: it cannot handle models which have cyclical dependencies. If a model has cyclical dependency and if swagger is enabled, then spring boot server crashes.
Related
I have read the swagger definitions and the format and understood that swagger definition is used to describe the APIs.
Would it be better to write the swagger definition and then the API? or to write the API first and then the swagger? I have no experience with this and I would like to write a REST API and a swagger file for an application.
I don't think the order really matters. Both methods are given legitimacy in the Swagger Getting Started Guide. The key thing is that one should be generated from the other, so you don't have to manually maintain both.
In the comments, cricket_007 has already mentioned that tools exist to generate the web service skeleton from the swagger definition. Using these tools, it would make sense to write the swagger definition first. This is the Top Down approach from the getting started guide.
From the Swagger getting started guide linked above, you can see that there are also tools available to generate Swagger docs from java code, provided you are using a particular framework like JAX-RS. This is the Bottom Up approach.
It comes down to personal preference. If you are the kind of person that would rather not "couple" your code base to Swagger and make sure that your application does not depend on Swagger to work, then the bottom up approach is best. However, if you want to fully embrace the Swagger tool chain and really "buy in" to it, then the top down approach is probably the best.
Also, if this is for educational purposes, then think about what you want to learn about. If you want to learn about writing JSON REST APIs from scratch (or using something like JAX-RS), then the bottom up approach will teach you more. However, if your goal is to learn as much as possible about Swagger, then the top down approach will be better.
I like the TDD approach to documenting your restful api with spring-rest-docs. However, I love "API Playground" feature enabled by swagger specification. I wish there was a way to get best of both worlds.
Is there a way to build swagger2 specs from spring rest docs? may be via building custom request/response preprocessors.
Do you have any thoughts or recommendations?
There's not out-of-the-box support for this in Spring REST Docs at the moment. The issue that you opened will track the possibility of adding such functionality. In the meantime, your best bet would be to look at writing a custom Snippet implementation that generates (part of) a Swagger specification.
Typically, a Spring REST Docs snippet deals with documentating a single resource, whereas a Swagger specification describes an entire service. This means that the Swagger specification Snippet implementation will need to accumulate state somehow, before producing a complete specification at the end. There are lots of ways to do that (in memory, multiple files that are combined in a post-processing step, etc.). It's not clear to me that one approach is obviously the right one so some experimentation would be useful. If you do some experimentation, please comment on the issue that you opened with your findings.
I'm trying to use the Swagger UI, and it says that I should begin by writing an api-doc that describes the exact api for a REST api. The problem is that I have no idea what this means. Is this document written in plain English? Or is there a certain format that will be able to generate the UI?
Thank you!
Swagger is a specification for describing REST APIs. Documentation of the specification can be found here - https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-spec.
Generally, there are two ways to document your API. If you already have an existing API with code, you can use any of the existing libraries (https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-spec#additional-libraries) to integrate into your code and generate documentation at run time. Some of those libraries also offer offline generation of such docs.
If you're looking to design an API, or would rather not integrate another library into your application, you can use https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-editor either locally or with the online version - http://editor.swagger.io.
Once you have the documentation, you can use Swagger UI to visualize and test it.
From all the various examples of Ember.js, I have not been able to figure out if there is a default method in Ember.js to do REST AJAX calls. Many examples build their own interfaces for CRUD operations. I even tried to sift through the code to find any reference to AJAX calls but came up with nothing.
So, my question is, is there a default implementation of REST API in Ember.js. If yes, how do I use it? Also if, for a specific application, I want to build custom CRUD methods, where do I plug these into Ember.js?
It seems that Ember Data is what you are looking for. It is part of emberjs organiztion in GitHub.
[2014-02-18: Deprecated - I no longer support ember-rest because it is overly simplistic, and would recommend using ember-data for most ember projects. Check out the Ember guides for an overview of ember-data as well as this example project ]
While learning Ember, I decided to create a very simple Ember REST library. I also wrote an example Rails CRUD app.
My goals were to keep this project as simple as possible, while still including error handling and validation. Ember REST is certainly much leaner than Ember Data and Ember Resource, and I hope you'll find the code well commented and accessible.
There is a Ember Resource library aiming REST JSON interfaces. It provides Ember.Resource class with save(), fetch() and destroy() operations that could be easily overriden. Looks like it should be more mature than Ember Data for now.
Ember.js can work nicely with Ember Data. That said, there is a specific format of REST to follow. When followed, you can streamline the process of connecting API with Ember and have so much less work.
In case you use custom REST, the place to adjust is:
adapter - to inform from where you like to get data
serializer - how data should be adjusted for custom REST API
Striving to ship a well documented application, I'm looking for a good way to describe a REST API for my Grails Application users.
I know that REST calls should be simple enough to be described by examples, but it doesn't feel formal enough.
I've spent a couple of hours looking for a solution suggested by other Grails users, but didn't find a neat solution besides a recommendation to use WADL or WSDL 2.0
This looks like a good direction, but there must be a simple way to do it in Grails.
I'd appreciate some guidance for a process to generate a REST API based on my model objects preferably with the ability to filter or control the exposed fields, plus, a nice graphical way to present it (something like the XSD Eclipse plugin)
Thanks!
Guy
I would suggest to avoid WADL or WSDL for API documentation, you can see this question where I explained my reasons: Why the slow WADL uptake.
WADL or WSDL are usually used for automatic client code generation, they are not human readable documentation. I don't think WADL or WSDL are very useful for a user to figure out how to consume the resources correctly.
I prefer the good old html documentation, for example I like the way twitter documented their API
If you insist on automatic generation of resources documentation I can recommend on the ATOM service document. Many REST framework can generate it automatically based on the resources annotations. (e.g. Apache Wink)