Interactive API documentation is nothing new. We’ve had Swagger UI, and other incarnations for over five years now. We also have API explorers, and full API lifecycle client solutions like Postman to help us engage with APIs, and be able to quickly see responses from the APIs we are consuming. In my effort to keep pushing forward the API documentation conversation I’ve been beating the drum for more visual solutions to be baked into our interactive documentation for a while now, encouraging providers to make the responses we receive much more meaningful and intuitive for consumers.
To help drum up awareness to this aspect of API documentation I’m always on the lookout for any interesting examples of it in the wild. There was the interesting approach out of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and now I’ve seen one out of the web data feeds API provider Webhose.io. When you are making API calls in their interactive dashboard you get a JSON response for things like news articles on the left-hand side, but you also get an interesting slider that will show a visual representation of the JSON response on the right side–making it much more readable to non-developers. https://goo.gl/HzRBFw #DataIntegration #ML
