openstack team mailing list archive

[Daryl Walleck <daryl.walleck@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

This is just my opinion, but I've only found WADLs very useful when use tool based automation. To me they're a huge headache to read. To me, the current dev guide style of documentation has been far more helpful in developing automation.

Daryl

On Oct 25, 2011, at 3:24 PM, Anne Gentle wrote:

Hi all -

Would also love Swagger. Nati looked into it and he thought it would require a Python client generator, based on reading that "Client generators are currently available for Scala, Java, Javascript, Ruby, PHP, and Actionscript 3." So in the meantime the QA list and Nati suggested WADL as a starting point for auto-generating simple API documentation while also looking towards Swagger for a way to document a public cloud like the Free Cloud. At the last OpenStack hackathon in the Bay Area (California), Nati worked through a simple WADL reader, he may be able to describe it better.

Hope that helps - sorry it's not more detailed than that but wanted to give some background, sounds like we all want similar outcomes and the resources for tasks to get us to outcomes is all we're lacking. QA Team, let me know how the Docs Team can work with you here.

Anne
Anne Gentle
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On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 2:41 PM, Joseph Heck <heckj@xxxxxxx<mailto:heckj@xxxxxxx>> wrote:
I expect this is going to open a nasty can of worms... today we don't have a consistent way of describing the APIs for the various services. I saw Nati's bug (https://launchpad.net/bugs/881621), which implies that all the services should have a WADL somewhere describing the API.

I'm not a huge fan of WADL, but the only other thing I've found is swagger (http://swagger.wordnik.com/spec).  I have been working towards trying to create an comprehensive OpenStack API documentation set that can be published as HTML, not unlike some of these:

       https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api
       http://developer.netflix.com/docs/REST_API_Reference
       http://code.google.com/p/bitly-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation#REST_API
       http://upcoming.yahoo.com/services/api/

To make this sort of web-page documentation effective, I think it's best to drive it from descriptions on each of the projects (if we can). I've checked with some friends who've done similar, and learned that most of the those API doc sets are maintained by hand - not generated from description files.

What do you all think about standardizing on WADL (or swagger) as a description of the API and generating comprehensive web-site-based API documentation from those description files? Does anyone have any other description formats that would work for this as an alternative?

(I admit I don't want to get into XML parsing hell, which is what it appears that WADL might lead too)

-joe


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