[asterisk-users] Manager Interface API's

[Jason Parker]

----- Douglas Garstang <dgarstang at oneeighty.com> wrote:
> Green pastures for sure. I think people develop the code, thinking
> they will write docs later on. By the time they get close to releasing
> their code, they've lost interest, or the priority of this project has
> decreased. It's human nature. The open source community then ends up
> with software thats unusable.
> 
> Is it so ludicrous that if you develop an API that you document it?
> We're not talking about developing a fahrenheight-celcius converter in
> basic here. We're talking about an <A>pplication <P>rogramming
> <I>interface! It's a programming interface. It's not the same as some
> GUI where you can get an idea of how it works by using it. If an API
> doesn't have any docs, it's completely useless.

I don't think anybody completely disagrees with you.  Documentation is important, and people like Jared Smith and Leif Madsen are doing a great job with doing documentation after the fact.

But, just to play devils advocate (no, not the pinball game), you point out that "API" stands for "Application Programming Interface".  If you are able to write a program which uses the API, you should also be able to read the comments in the code and other code that uses the API, to fairly easily figure out how it works. :)  If the documentation was so horrible that nobody could figure it out, there would be no programs that use it - and we both know that to be false.

> 
> Doug.

-- 
Jason Parker
Digium