In this article, I will explain Swagger and how you can use it to create documentation for your REST API built with SpringBoot.

What is Swagger?

Swagger is an open-source tool to develop APIs, interact with APIs, and mainly generate documentation for APIs.

Why do we need documentation for an API?

The API documentation is a technical content deliverable containing instructions about how to effectively use and integrate with an API. It’s a reference manual containing all the information required to work with the API, with details about the endpoints, functions, classes, return types, arguments, etc.

Third-party developers who are using your API want to integrate as quickly as possible to move forward in their software development. So they should soon understand the value and usage of your API.

The aggregate experience of the developer when discovering, learning to use, and finally integrating with an API is termed as Developer Experience. The API documentation is the key to an excellent developer experience.

Your API can be the best functional API, but no one will use it if they don’t know how to. Documentation is the foundation for good Developer Experience.

How Can Swagger be used to documenting APIs?

Swagger allows developers to add the metadata to the API application and then generates documentation in various forms like JSON, YAML, and also fully readable HTML. Developers do not need to update the documentation. Swagger takes care of that!

So it’s all about what is Swagger and how it helps the API documentation. Now let’s look at how can we use Swagger to generate API documentation for our Spring Boot application.

#spring-boot #swagger #java #api