Writing documentation manually for a RESTful API can be laborious. On the other hand, relying exclusively on the generation of the documentation (e.g. with swagger-ui) is often not sufficient. There are always aspects (like common use cases and workflows) that need to be described manually. Let’s see how we can combine these two approaches with the help of AsciiDoc!

Consuming RESTful services can be a laborious task, because there is much low-level-work to do. Jealously we looked at the WS*/SOAP guys: They can easily generate a nice client API based on the formal interface specification WSDL. This significantly simplifies the service consumption. For a long time the REST world lacks a widespread formal specification and generation tools. But Swagger sets out to change this.