On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 11:29 PM, Brian Gerstle <bgerstle(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
JSON Schema is a recurring theme here which I'd
like to encourage. I've
thought it was a promising idea and would like to explore it further, both
on the client and server side. If we can somehow keep data schema and API
specifications separate, it would be nice to develop both of these ideas in
parallel.
That's exactly our idea for RESTBase/SOA. Each interface would be packaged
separately as a swagger specification, which would then be required by and
implemented by modules. Having such a clean and clear separation of the two
would allow us to:
- consult the interface independently of the implementation
- have multiple modules implementing the same interface
As to JSON, IMHO YAML is better, more human-readable and less verbose, but
that's just a matter of personal preference - computers can read them all :P
Marko
On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 10:57 PM, Ori Livneh
<ori(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 12:30 PM, James Douglas
<jdouglas(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
> 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].
Hi James,
I missed your session at the developer summit, so the slides and notes
are
very useful. I think that having a formal
specification for an API as a
standalone, machine-readable document is a great idea. I have been poking
at Chrome's Remote Debugging API this week and found this project, which
is
a cool demonstration of the power of this
approach:
https://github.com/cyrus-and/chrome-remote-interface
The library consists of just two files: the protocol specification[0],
which is represented as a JSON Schema, and the library code[1], which
generates an API by walking the tree of objects and methods. This
approach
allows the code to be very concise. If future
versions of the remote
debugging protocol are published as JSON Schema files, the library could
be
updated without changing a single line of code.
MediaWiki's API provides internal interfaces for API modules to describe
their inputs and outputs, but that's not quite as powerful as having the
specification truly decoupled from the code and published as a separate
document. I'm glad to see that you are taking this approach with
RestBASE.
[0]:
https://github.com/cyrus-and/chrome-remote-interface/blob/master/lib/protoc…
[1]:
https://github.com/cyrus-and/chrome-remote-interface/blob/master/lib/chrome…
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Marko Obrovac
Senior Services Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation