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An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. [ 1 ] A document or standard that describes how to build such a connection or interface is called an API specification.
OpenAPI Specification. The OpenAPI Specification, previously known as the Swagger Specification, is a specification for a machine-readable interface definition language for describing, producing, consuming and visualizing web services. [1] Originally developed to support the Swagger framework, it became a separate project in 2015, overseen by ...
An example of a popular web API is the Astronomy Picture of the Day API operated by the American space agency NASA. It is a server-side API used to retrieve photographs of space or other images of interest to astronomers, and metadata about the images. According to the API documentation, [15] the API has one endpoint:
API description languages are sometimes called interface description languages (IDLs). The structured description might be used to generate documentation for human programmers; such documentation may be easier to read than free-form documentation, since all documentation generated by the same tool follows the same formatting conventions ...
Javadoc. Javadoc is a documentation generator created by Sun Microsystems for the Java language (now owned by Oracle Corporation) for generating API documentation in HTML format from Java source code. The HTML format is used for adding the convenience of being able to hyperlink related documents together. [1]
Documentation generator. A documentation generator is a programming tool that generates software documentation intended for programmers (API documentation) or end users (end-user guide), or both, from a set of source code files, and in some cases, binary files. Some generators, such as Javadoc, can use special comments to drive the generation.
Open API. An open API (often referred to as a public API) is a publicly available application programming interface that provides developers with programmatic access to a (possibly proprietary) software application or web service. [1] Open APIs are APIs that are published on the internet and are free to access by consumers.
When creating APIs, Swagger tooling may be used to automatically generate an Open API document based on the code itself. This embeds the API description in the source code of a project and is informally called code-first or bottom-up API development. Alternatively, using Swagger Codegen, developers can decouple the source code from the Open API ...