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Swagger UI vs jsdoc: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this markdown, we will compare Swagger UI and jsdoc, highlighting the key differences between the two tools.
Real-time API documentation: Swagger UI allows for real-time API documentation, enabling developers to document their APIs and generate interactive documentation instantly. On the other hand, jsdoc is mainly used for documenting JavaScript code, focusing on providing documentation for functions, variables, and classes. While Swagger UI is dedicated to API documentation, jsdoc is a documentation tool for JavaScript code in general.
User Interface: Swagger UI provides a user-friendly and visually pleasing interface, allowing users to interact with the API directly from the documentation. It offers features like trying out API endpoints, sending requests, and viewing responses. Jsdoc, on the other hand, generates documentation in a more traditional format, typically as HTML pages with basic styling. It provides a navigable index and categorizes the content, but lacks the advanced UI features of Swagger UI.
Automatic API Exploration: Swagger UI automatically explores and discovers the available API endpoints based on the underlying code or provided API specifications. It generates a comprehensive list of available endpoints, including their parameters, request bodies, and response schemas. Jsdoc, on the other hand, requires manual annotation of the code to generate documentation. Developers need to explicitly add comments or tags to indicate the purpose and usage of functions, variables, and classes.
Interoperability: Swagger UI is designed to be interoperable and supports various input formats, including OpenAPI Specification (OAS) and Swagger Specification. This allows developers to integrate their existing API specifications or generate new ones using different tools. Jsdoc, on the other hand, is primarily focused on JavaScript code and does not have built-in support for interoperability with other languages or specifications.
Community and Ecosystem: Swagger UI has a large and active community, with extensive resources, tutorials, and support available. It is widely used and integrated with various tools and frameworks in the API development ecosystem. Jsdoc also has a considerable community and ecosystem, but its focus on JavaScript code limits its reach compared to the more API-centric Swagger UI.
Extensibility and Customization: Swagger UI provides a wide range of customization options, allowing developers to tailor the documentation to their specific needs. It supports custom themes, plugins, and extensions, making it highly flexible. Jsdoc also offers customization options, allowing developers to define templates and modify the generated documentation, but it may require more advanced configuration and customization skills.
In summary, Swagger UI excels in providing real-time API documentation with a user-friendly interface and automatic exploration, supporting various specifications and offering extensive customization options. On the other hand, jsdoc is focused on documenting JavaScript code, providing a traditional documentation format with manual annotation requirements and fewer advanced UI features.
From a StackShare Community member: "I just started working for a start-up and we are in desperate need of better documentation for our API. Currently our API docs is in a README.md file. We are evaluating Postman and Swagger UI. Since there are many options and I was wondering what other StackSharers would recommend?"
I use Postman because of the ease of team-management, using workspaces and teams, runner, collections, environment variables, test-scripts (post execution), variable management (pre and post execution), folders (inside collections, for better management of APIs), newman, easy-ci-integration (and probably a few more things that I am not able to recall right now).
I use Swagger UI because it's an easy tool for end-consumers to visualize and test our APIs. It focuses on that ! And it's directly embedded and delivered with the APIs. Postman's built-in tools aren't bad, but their main focus isn't the documentation and also, they are hosted outside the project.
I recommend Postman because it's easy to use with history option. Also, it has very great features like runner, collections, test scripts runners, defining environment variables and simple exporting and importing data.
Pros of jsdoc
- Far less verbose2
- Actively maintained1
- Simpler type safe than TypeScript1
- No compiler needed1
- Does almost everything TS does1
Pros of Swagger UI
- Open Source49
- Can execute api calls from the documentation34
- Free to use29
- Customizable19
- Easy to implement in .Net14
- Mature, clean spec13
- API Visualization12
- Coverage9
- Scaffolding6
- Easy to use6
- Vibrant and active community5
- Elegant4
- Adopted by tm forum api3
- Clear for React2
- Api1
- Can deploy API to AWS API Gateway and AWS Lambda1
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Cons of jsdoc
Cons of Swagger UI
- Need to learn YAML and RAML3
- Documentation doesn't look that good2
- Doesn't generate code snippets in different languages1
- You don’t actually get in-line error highlighting1
- Does not support hypermedia1
