If you are heading down the path of a Microservices style of architecture, one tenant you will need to embrace is automation. Many moving parts are introduced with this style of architecture. If successful, your environment will have a plethora of service APIs available that the enterprise can consume for application development and integration.

This means that there must be a way that available API documentation can be discovered. API information needs to be effectively communicated throughout the enterprise that shows where APIs are used, how often APIs are used, and when APIs change. Not having this type of monitoring in place will hinder and possibly cripple the agility benefits that a Microservice style of architecture can bring to the enterprise.

This blog will describe how Swagger/OpenAPI documentation can be applied to a Spring Boot implementation. We will show how API documentation and monitoring can be automatically published to an API documentation portal.

As an example, we introduce a reference Spring Boot API CRUD application (using Spring MVC/Data with Spring Fox) and set up the automatic publishing of API documentation and statistics to documentation portal GrokOla. In the example, we introduce two open source utilities to help and allow published APIs the ability to be searched and notify users when changed….