The value of an API, such as a RESTful service, to a large extent depends on how easy it is to consume! Good and easily accessible documentation is an important part of whether an API is useful. In this chapter, we will learn how we can use OpenAPI/Swagger to document APIs that we can make externally accessible from a microservice landscape.
As we mentioned in Chapter 2, Introduction to Spring Boot, Swagger is one of the most commonly used specifications when it comes to documenting RESTful services, and many of the leading API gateways have native support for Swagger. We will learn how to use SpringFox to produce such documentation, the kind of changes in source code required to document the eternal API using SpringFox. We will try out Swagger documentation, which shows how to use an embedded...