A number of RESTful web API metadata standards have emerged in the recent past. The objective of this chapter is to introduce you to some of the popular RESTful web API documentation tools, namely WADL, RAML, and Swagger. This chapter is not meant for making any recommendation on choosing a documentation solution for your RESTful web application, but to help you understand the API documentation tools and their offerings in general. To choose the right solution for your organization, you should start by looking at client applications that access the APIs and their usage pattern, and then choose a tool that makes the API consumption easier, which may eventually improve the adoption of APIs by the customers.

The next chapter summarizes the best practices and coding guidelines that developers will find useful when building RESTful web service applications. This chapter is very important for you as a developer and it is worth spending time on each item that we discuss.