Spyrest: Automated restful api documentation using an http proxy server (n)

SM Sohan, C Anslow, F Maurer - 2015 30th IEEE/ACM …, 2015 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
2015 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software …, 2015ieeexplore.ieee.org
RESTful API documentation is expensive to produce and maintain due to the lack of
reusable tools and automated solutions. Most RESTful APIs are documented manually and
the API developers are responsible for keeping the documentation up to date as the API
evolves making the process both costly and error-prone. In this paper we introduce a novel
technique using an HTTP proxy server that can be used to automatically generate RESTful
API documentation and demonstrate SpyREST, an example implementation of the proposed …
RESTful API documentation is expensive to produce and maintain due to the lack of reusable tools and automated solutions. Most RESTful APIs are documented manually and the API developers are responsible for keeping the documentation up to date as the API evolves making the process both costly and error-prone. In this paper we introduce a novel technique using an HTTP proxy server that can be used to automatically generate RESTful API documentation and demonstrate SpyREST, an example implementation of the proposed technique. SpyREST uses a proxy to intercept example API calls and intelligently produces API documentation for RESTful Web APIs by processing the request and response data. Using the proposed HTTP proxy server based technique, RESTful API developers can significantly reduce the cost of producing and maintaining API documentation by replacing a large manual process with an automated process.
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