Sleepless in Salt Lake City: Documenting Web Services with Enunciate

Sleepless in Salt Lake City: Documenting Web Services with Enunciate

Understanding the workings of a Web Service from the perspective of a consumer, be it REST or SOAP based is not the easiest. Wading through a WADL or a WSDL is not a fun task, at least not for me.  Been looking into an open source project that has been around for some time called Enunciate and am pretty impressed by its capabilities.

Enunciate provides automated documentation of your resources and end points. It also has the ability to generate client artifacts for consuming the JAX-RS services in many different programming languages.

The process is itself quite simple. After creating your web service you have enunciate run as part of your build process and it generates nice HTML based documentation of your service along with client code (Yeah!) in different languages to consume the service. Using annotation based web services facilitates this nice magic I guess.

To experience enunciate for myself, I created a simple web service that exposes SOAP and REST based calls of the same underlying API.

A few simple criteria that I had for my sample application:

• Documentation should be available at the Root context
• Resources and Services must also be available at the Root context

Read full article from Sleepless in Salt Lake City: Documenting Web Services with Enunciate