Combining API Metrics with API Error Docs
If you don't know about API Error docs, read our previous post: Introducing API Error Docs. If you're using our API Metrics product, this knows about all of the types of error that your API may produce and…
Basic OAS Server Variables Support in API Explorer
Update (Feb 18th, 2022): We’ve since shipped support for enums and you can now manually enter Server Variables via <input>. We’ve updated the content below to reflect this! OAS 3 introduced the concept of Server Variables.…
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Workflow: Generating an OAS File From Your Code
OAS/Swagger provides us with a standardized way to document APIs, giving us a format which can be accepted by a multitude of tools to produce (largely) the same results. This is great! Open formats mean…
Upgrading React to v16 and Enzyme to v3
A couple of weeks ago React v16 was released with some exciting new features including returning arrays from render() functions (no more wrapping <divs>!), better server side rendering and performance improvements. Read more here: https://reactjs.org/blog/2017/09/26/react-v16.0.html We're not yet using…
Using async/await in Node.js 7.6.0
Last week saw the release of Node.js v7.6.0 which contained (amongst other things) an update to v8 5.5 (Node's underlying JS engine). This v8 release includes a brand new language feature: async functions. Utilising this…
The History of REST APIs
In 1999, the API environment was a free-for-all. At that point, most developers had to deal with SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) to integrate APIs. And the “simple” part of that acronym is not to…
How to Generate an OpenAPI Description for an API
Describing an API according to the OpenAPI Specification comes with a wide variety of benefits for maintaining APIs in production, and keeping docs automatically synchronized with your live API. You don't have to start over-designing…
How to Use OpenAPI and Swagger for Documentation
Excellent API documentation experiences stem from proper use of an OpenAPI or Swagger API description file. In this guide, we explain Swagger and OpenAPI, how to create an OpenAPI or Swagger description for an API,…
6 Faux Pas of HTTP API Design
HTTP APIs are very loose by definition: there’s no standards body, no API validator and not always someone there to tell you when you may be doing something incorrect. At ReadMe we have lots of…
The Most Effective API Quick Start Guides, in 7 Examples
Developers are notorious for always taking the “learn-by-doing” approach to learning. We often skim the API docs to get the basics, and then turn to our command line to start tinkering around with the code—with…