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TypeSpec: A new language for API-centric development

typespec.io

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Re: TypeSpec: A new language for API-centric development

#41

Post by monkfish328 »

wg0 wrote: post #38
martinn wrote: post #37

Could someone clarify what's the use case of a tool like this please. Is this something that helps if you, say, are building a new API and will need to create both the server implementation as well as the client implementations in multiple languages? And so, it can automatically do all of that for you based on an API spec? Or is it something different. Funnily enough, I developed a Python library recently that allows…

If you are in a situation where you have a backend and you want to expose an API and then you would eventually want a client, you would need format specs as the starting point where server and clients are generated from that one source. At the moment, OpenAPI with YAML is the only way to go but you can't easily split the spec into separate files as you would do any program with packages, modules and what not. There a…

So just to clarify, how would one go about auto-generating a stub handler for these route definitions?

Re: TypeSpec: A new language for API-centric development

#42

Post by martinn »

wg0 wrote: post #38
martinn wrote: post #37

Could someone clarify what's the use case of a tool like this please. Is this something that helps if you, say, are building a new API and will need to create both the server implementation as well as the client implementations in multiple languages? And so, it can automatically do all of that for you based on an API spec? Or is it something different. Funnily enough, I developed a Python library recently that allows…

If you are in a situation where you have a backend and you want to expose an API and then you would eventually want a client, you would need format specs as the starting point where server and clients are generated from that one source. At the moment, OpenAPI with YAML is the only way to go but you can't easily split the spec into separate files as you would do any program with packages, modules and what not. There a…

Thanks, that makes sense for that use case.

My question is probably a more general one around the use case for writing an API spec (in a format like OpenAPI or TypeSpec), and then translating and writing the server implementation to match that. As opposed to being able to create the API spec automatically based on server implementation (and being able to easily refresh it).

Understand that writing the spec and then the server implementation seems to have some benefits. I'm curious to hear about the common use cases for it, as in my mind I could quickly stub a server implementation (and automatically generate a spec) rather than try to create the spec by hand and then write the server implementation again. But I'm sure there's some other things I'm missing.

Re: TypeSpec: A new language for API-centric development

#43

Post by usrusr »

Feels like cheating, next to the yaml of openapi anything will look good. And that's all while I'm still considering openapi one of the best things that have happened.

But I've also been kind of holding my breath for typescript making it's breakthrough as a schema language. More specifically its surprisingly big non-imperative, non-functional subset, obviously. And at first glance this seems to be exactly this, "what if we removed javascript from typescript so that only typing for JSON remains and added some endpoint metadata description to make it a viable successor to openapi and wsdl.

Re: TypeSpec: A new language for API-centric development

#44

Post by [deleted] »

usrusr wrote: post #43

Feels like cheating, next to the yaml of openapi anything will look good. And that's all while I'm still considering openapi one of the best things that have happened. But I've also been kind of holding my breath for typescript making it's breakthrough as a schema language. More specifically its surprisingly big non-imperative, non-functional subset, obviously. And at first glance this seems to be exactly this, "what…

[deleted]

Re: TypeSpec: A new language for API-centric development

#45

Post by vbezhenar »

usrusr wrote: post #43

Feels like cheating, next to the yaml of openapi anything will look good. And that's all while I'm still considering openapi one of the best things that have happened. But I've also been kind of holding my breath for typescript making it's breakthrough as a schema language. More specifically its surprisingly big non-imperative, non-functional subset, obviously. And at first glance this seems to be exactly this, "what…

TypeScript type system is very advanced. It won't be possible to generate corresponding bindings for all popular languages, while keeping them idiomatic. I'd prefer API language to be very simple and straightforward.

Re: TypeSpec: A new language for API-centric development

#46

Post by vbezhenar »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #6

Looks like the Typescript version of WSDL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Services_Description_Langu... Perhaps it will last longer than WSDL did?

WSDL issue was that it was designed by a committee of several huge companies. So it was inconsistent and bloated. Same could be said about many XML-related standards.

Nowadays big companies rarely work together and prefer to throw their own solutions to the market, hoping to capture it. That results in a higher quality approaches, because it's developed by a single team and focused on a single goal, rather than trying to please 10 vendors with their own agendas.

Re: TypeSpec: A new language for API-centric development

#49

Post by pjmlp »

> At Microsoft, we believe in the value of using our own products, a practice often referred to as "dogfooding".

One would think, unfortunely that is not how it looks like in the zoo of native Windows desktop development, or Xamarin/MAUI adoption in their mobile apps.

Re: TypeSpec: A new language for API-centric development

#50

Post by wg0 »

monkfish328 wrote: post #41
wg0 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are in a situation where you have a backend and you want to expose an API and then you would eventually want a client, you would need format specs as the starting point where server and clients are generated from that one source. At the moment, OpenAPI with YAML is the only way to go but you can't easily split the spec into separate files as you would do any program with packages, modules and what not. There a…

So just to clarify, how would one go about auto-generating a stub handler for these route definitions?

One such that i know of is oapi-codegen[0] for Go. Highly recommended. And for Typescript, I think it is hard to beat Open API Typescript [1]

[0]. https://github.com/deepmap/oapi-codegen

[1]. https://openapi-ts.pages.dev/

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