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Comment by bvanvugt | Hacker News Reader

Awesome - what about using API Editors (or similar tools) as a way to browse or explore an API?

I've seen a lot of companies roll their own API "Explorers" too: https://dev.twitter.com/rest/tools/console https://developers.facebook.com/tools/ http://products.wolframalpha.com/api/explorer.html

As well as generic Rest API Explorers: http://www.getpostman.com/

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Not precisely what you're looking for, but Django Rest Framework [1] provides web browsable API endpoints by default. The owner of the project is also working on a counterpart for Flask (no commits in 8 months though). [2]

[1] https://github.com/tomchristie/django-rest-framework/blob/ma...

[2] https://github.com/tomchristie/flask-api

I regularly use interactive API documentation to test APIs. It's just so much easier than using cURL or writing a script.

Most startups can't afford to spend the time and engineering resource reinventing the wheel for API documentation, especially with the "explorer" or interactive test consoles that have become so popular.

As someone who wrote one recently, it's not so hard to build the interactive testing portion as the live editing functionality. I built an API documentation site over a week's period with interactive consoles and examples. (We use WADL as opposed to Swagger or others due to legacy reasons)

Live editing of API functionality? Much more complicated.

whats it called? is it public?

Check out Apigee SmartDocs: https://blog.apigee.com/detail/apigee_smartdocs_introducing_...

(top level readers: sorry about the double-post)

Why the apigee links? We want to see what this guy built over a week.

sad to see the spam indeed

I was assuming you or others wanted something you could actually use today.

Sorry, it's not public and I would probably get run out of town for basing it largely on jQuery and Handlebars. (It is fast though) It looks very similar to swagger.io except everything is expanded by default and I put a very basic js search capability that filters endpoints.

Cool, would love to see it if available publicly.

Check out Apigee SmartDocs: https://blog.apigee.com/detail/apigee_smartdocs_introducing_...

I agree that the editing functionality is more complicated but still contend that most startups would benefit from using an existing solution. Wether that's a service or an open-source project doesn't matter so much.

Here's an interactive API testing tool I made: https://github.com/Mashape/API-Test-Console

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