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If you are following my blog, you should know that I’ve been spending time to explore new products – software and hardware. I got myself the Tenda WiFi Router, I learnt how to send SMS from WordPress using and what not. Today’s post too is something that I’ve been spending quite some time for the past few days.
Being a software developer, more often than not, you tend to spend more time on the documentation and maintenance of the code rather than actually developing it. Documenting everything right from day one of a project is embedded in the work culture of the organisation. I’ve seen people documenting their code is a simple word file or a notepad file. That’s not the right way since these tools aren’t meant for API documentation. But as the team size grow, it gets really difficult to document and maintain the new code changes and fixes. So after making your lives easier with ViaSocket Web Hook, here’s ViaSocket API Docs that allows you to create highly interactive API Documents and test the document on the fly. So let’s dive in.
API Documentation ? What’s that ?
API as I told in the previous post also, is a glue for our current multi-platform digital economy. Everything around us is talking to every other thing over an API which is why we talk about connected world. When developers start working on their code, they have thousands of amazing APIs to supercharge their apps. For instance most of the mobile apps that you see today have an option to Log In/Sign Up using Facebook, Twitter or Gmail. That’s nothing but but simple (and secured) API calls to the respective services.
API Documentation is a ready reckoner for software developers and acts as handbook to use a particular API. The document usually talks about the various elements of the API, the endpoints, the request, response and all of that. So if you are working with any API, I’m pretty sure that you will have an API documentation for it. There’s absolutely no API in the market that doesn’t have a documentation. So why we actually need an API documentation ?
Need for an API Documentation
Whether you are a software behemoth having thousands of APIs or an individual developer, documenting API is one of the key tasks before you make it available to the world – sharing it publicly or privately within your team. Your document should be able to communicate effectively with the target audience. When you have an API documentation, more and more people would want to use it, because of the availability of a guide. This ensures that you have more people using your APIs. It saves a lot of time and money that can otherwise be spent on R&D. Along with this, an API document helps you maintain your code in the long run. It will help not only your team but your customers also.
Free API Documentation with ViaSocket API Docs
Last post, I spoke about ViaSocket and how you can supercharge your apps with an end to end API automation tool. With their in house API documentation service, ViaSocket is betting big on making a developer’s life easy. The ViaSocket API documentation helps you to create beautiful and helpful API documentation that you can share not only with your internal team but also your customers, and all of that for FREE.
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Since the ViaSocket API documentation service is hosted on the cloud, It will help ensure API documents are available to everyone from anywhere at anytime. And as most of the developers code during odd hours, this ensures that they never ever see a broken page. Along with cloud, this uses advanced CDN, that ensures that your page loads fast anywhere, everywhere.
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ViaSocket API also helps you generate code automatically using Java, PHP, Node and C# with examples. So with this you can have your document setup along with live examples so that your users can take these examples and integrate with their application. Not only that, it helps you to test and run the APIs in real time before you can actually integrate with a simple click.
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The documentation is dynamic and hence updating the document and updating your customers is pretty easy. One click and you are ready with the updated document. The service also allows you to format the document as you wish with White Label options and have your branding with beautiful template and have it at your domain also.
ViaSocket API Documentation vs the rest
You must also be wondering that how ViaSocket stacks up with other services like Readme and Postman. All these services offer API documentation services and each of them has their own flavor. However there are a few things that makes ViaSocket API documentation service stand apart from the rest. One of the main reasons why I suggest you to opt for ViaSocket API documentation is their pricing.
ViaSocket is a Free API Documentation service that allows you to host and share multiple documents without any restriction on views. Almost everything you can think of except branding (Requires a small one time subscription fee) comes free. If you are small team of coders wanting to have a reliable API documentation service then this is for you. Postman has a limit of maximum 1000 views a month while Readme doesn’t have a free plan. Also ViaSocket allows you to host your APIs on the ViaSocket marketplace too (With close to 300 API docs already on the market place, this is a great place to acquire customers). So in return for providing you with a FREE API documentation service, ViaSocket will host your (public APIs) on their growing marketplace that can help generate leads for your business.
In the end, I’d say that if you are looking for a reliable, easy to setup and a Free API documentation service, ViaSocket is a good choice. Moreover, if you with the suite of apps provided by ViaSocket, your customers can use your API (thanks to the API documentation) and make use of 3rd party services using Socket. It’s easy to setup with lots of formatting options available. I’ve interacted with the team on a couple of occasions and trust me they are a much of amazing people who are ready to help you out. That’s about it in this tech post for this week. Go check out their service and get going. If you are already using their services and want to point out anything that I’ve missed, do mention in the comments below or tweet to me at @atulmaharaj
