[gjtorikian]

I wholeheartedly agree with everything above. Two additional and related thoughts:

1. The original documentation tool I wrote for Atom, Biscotto, kept track of the number of undocumented classes / methods: https://github.com/gjtorikian/biscotto/blob/59f48ba2621a92ae... . It was hooked up to CI, and if the count fell below a certain threshold, the test failed.

2. Right now, we're exploring into working with JSON schema as a means of providing both testing validation and accurate documentation. If the schema says "This REST method expects a parameter of this type," it becomes very easy to write a test to enforce that behavior; documentation can be easily generated from it; and of course your production code is safer for it.

I'm a huge fan of introducing more cross-overs between testing and documentation. I think a lot of time is spent on "clever" (and subjective) validations like http://www.hemingwayapp.com/, but not enough time is spent on basic content checks. It's very easy to drift code, tests, and docs apart. We need to start thinking about all three of them working together.

[conorgil145]

I could not agree more strongly that working on code, docs, and tests as a single unit is an excellent approach to development. I think the best way to convince most developers of doing this is to create tools which make it as automated as possible. If using a tool actually makes their lives easier to accomplish something they already do (write tests? write docs?) and they get the other for free, then that is a huge selling point.

I had a similar idea about using JSON Schema to validate my API. However, a few issues that I thought of and a few I discovered while researching:

1) I am not aware of a decent JSON Schema editor. It has been on my wishlist/TODO list for a looong time to write one myself which has similar capability to something like Oxygen for XML [1], but I have not had the time. Do you plan to write and update the JSON Schema by hand?

2) I have not researched them in great detail yet, but Swagger [2] and API Doc [3] seem to have already defined something similar to what I had in mind with JSON Schema. Have you looked into those tools yet?

[1] http://www.oxygenxml.com/index.html [2] https://helloreverb.com/developers/swagger [3] http://apidoc.me/doc/gettingStarted

[gjtorikian]

> Do you plan to write and update the JSON Schema by hand?

Currently, yes, unfortunately. ;____; We've talked about doing it in an intermediate format, like YAML, which is slightly less painful, but....ugh. Years ago I wrote a very badly-coded-but-essentially-functional tool called Panino, which converted Markdown-to-JSON: https://github.com/gjtorikian/panino-docs/tree/master/lib/pa....

I see that some people have picked up on that and ran along with it, too: https://github.com/apiaryio/mson. So there might be something there to explore.

2. I've never looked into either. I know Swagger is used by several companies, like Twitter, but API Doc is new to me.