Documentation and REST API Announcement

Over the last two months Koinos Group has been hard at work renovating the Koinos docs site and we are happy to announce that it is now live! You can check it out at docs.koinos.io.

The site has been completely redone from the ground up to provide clear, well-organized, and accurate documentation.

These docs are a crucial milestone for Koinos, demonstrating that the platform is now sufficiently stable and mature to justify complete documentation. Koinos is, after all, a decentralized application development platform, but without high quality documentation it is just not possible to take full advantage of its unique capabilities.

Contribute!

Having world class documentation is a never-ending process. We are in the process of completing more guides and will continue to add documentation and improve the site, but we need your help!

Written almost entirely in markdown, the new docs are easy for community members to contribute to so if you want to fix minor errors, improve the wording of a section, or add an entirely new section, please make a pull request on our public repo at https://github.com/koinos/koinos-docs.

REST Microservice

We’ve also released a REST Microservice which is great for developers. This new microservice is based on Roamin’s REST API server, but ready to be deployed in any Koinos node. Roamin did a fantastic job which saved us a lot of time.

The API can use the Swagger format which not only documents the API, but allows for useful tools such as https://docs.koinos.io/developers/rest/. There are also Swagger libraries in many languages that enable developers to interact with a REST API using a language native library. This is yet another way that Koinos will be made accessible to developers in more programming languages.

We’ve also taken this opportunity to divorce public-facing APIs from the internal microservice communication which will also allow us to make changes to the microservice interfaces without affecting developers using the REST API.

This allows us to structure the REST API with a focus on developer experience.

Deprecations

As a result of these improvements, we will be deprecating the JSON-RPC and gRPC microservices in their current form. We will continue to support them for the foreseeable future because there are many applications relying on these APIs, but they will not be under active development. Only the gRPC API will be redesigned to better match the REST API.

The new REST API can be deployed in Koinos node v2.1.0 (https://github.com/koinos/koinos/releases/tag/v2.1.0) or accessed using KoinosPro. You can always sign up for a free KoinosPro account if you want to try the new API!

Let us know what you think of the documentation. We are eager to hear your feedback so that we can make it even better!