SpyREST in Action: An Automated RESTful API Documentation Tool

Abstract

RESTful APIs are often manually documented. As a result, the process of maintaining the documentation of RESTful APIs is both expensive and error-prone. In this demonstration paper, we present SpyREST as an automated software as a service tool that can be used to document RESTful APIs. SpyREST leverages an HTTP Proxy server to intercept real API calls to automatically collect and generate RESTful API documentation by processing HTTP traffic involved in API calls. SpyREST provides an automated yet customizable example based documentation solution for RESTful APIs. RESTful API developers can use SpyREST to automatically generate and maintain updated API documentation.