Howdy all,
It was a pleasure chatting with you at this year's Developer Summit[1]
about how we might give SOA a shot in the arm by creating (and building
from) specifications.
The slides are available on the RESTBase project pages[2] and the session
notes are available on Etherpad[3].
I'm eager to keep the conversation going on the mailing list, and want to
address a couple items that came up (or were missing) during the session,
as well as prompt for further discussion.
I mentioned after the presentation that we're using our spec to drive our
automated testing. I added some info about that to slide #14 in the
slides[2]. The idea is that, since Swagger lets us add custom fields to a
spec, we can augment each endpoint specification with a functional
description of its expected inputs and outputs. During testing, we parse
the spec and verify that these indeed hold true. There's a lot of
opportunity for enhancement of our (currently very basic) approach to this,
but it's already proving pretty handy from a coverage standpoint.
There was a question in the notes[3] about Swagger's support for
internationalization, but I'm not familiar with the use case in mind. How
might an API differ, aside from the content of fields in a specified model,
under different localizations? Might users want the models themselves (or
parameter names, etc.) to vary?
Cheers!
James
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Developer_Summit_2015
[2]
http://wikimedia.github.io/restbase/docs/presentations/wm-dev-summit-2015/s…
[3]
https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/mwds15-spec-oriented-architecture