New community projects

We’re excited that RAML is catching on, the community is growing, and developers from all over the world are building and publishing new and exciting tools  for everyone to use and contribute to. We have published two of these tools (details below) on the RAML projects page this week, and hope you get a chance to try them out.

RAML to HTML

An easy-to-install and even-easier-to-use command line interface that takes a RAML file and generates documentation in a single HTML page (the only dependencies are bootstrap and jQuery). The installation and usage instructions can be found here, but due to its simplicity, I can just copy into two single lines:

npm i -g raml2html

raml2html example.raml > example.html

The generated page is clean and smart:

Screenshot of the page showing all resources and methods

Screenshot of the page showing the method GET for the resource “songs”

I said it was simple! Simple is good. You can find the source code on Github and contribute to it (Personally, I would  love to see this project generating Markdown documentation too). Thanks to @mixedCase for this contribution.

ATOM RAML Package

I really hope you are already using ATOM, _the hackable text editor _by Github guys. If so, you will be happy to read that there is already a package for it that will help you when writing  RAML definitions. You can find the installation instructions and the code here for both using and contributing. The supported features thus far are Syntax Highlighting and Snippet code generation (just hitting tab when writing any HTTP verb).

Idea for contributors: Since ATOM is hackable, the same way it has a Markdown previewer, I’d love to see  dynamically generated HTML preview while I type (I guess that RAML to HTML project would be ideal to generate that HTML). Thanks to @NachoEsmite for this contribution.

Become a contributor

If you are thinking about great RAML tools, I would like to encourage you to start contributing. Here are a couple of recommendations:

• Check GitHub for related projects: Sometimes it’s better to contact another person working on the same idea you have.
• Read and Open discussions in the RAML Forum: You can find some interesting ideas, ask for opinions and reviews, publish your projects and invite contributors to join you.
• Social Networking: If you haven’t done it already, check Twitter to be up-to-date with the latests news from the community all around the world. #RAML is not being used by everyone, so I usually search for “RAML” and tweet with “#RAML”.
• If you have already developed a project and want it to be published in the RAML projects list, just write to mail:info@raml.org
• Feel free to contact me, if you have questions.

Cheers!