spectrum VS openapi-generator

Disclosure: I'm a contributor to the project.

OpenAPI Spec and auto-generated API clients are very useful when multiple languages need to be supported, like when running a developer program. I've worked at companies that both use OpenAPI Generator for official clients and ones that wrote our own tools for API client SDK generation (with different design philosophy). I've used a number of generators myself to compare and submitted fixes / enhancements to OpenAPI Generator. I used the Go client generator a while back and compared it to others, and recently started using the Crystal one.

To get the most the project, the following is useful: (a) need to support multiple languages, (b) ability to update the generator's code, both in Java and templates (Mustache or Handlebars), and (c) ability to discuss design in GitHub issues and the Slack channel.

The nice thing about OpenAPI Spec is that there is an ecosystem of tooling to support it, including rendering API references (HTML and PDF), API explorers (HTML pages to execute API calls), API clients, etc. But there is a learning curve. For writing specs by hand, I use and favor the Stoplight Studio IDE ( https://stoplight.io/studio ). For programmatically analyzing and editing specs, which is especially useful for finalizing auto-generated specs, I've built an OpenAPI Spec SDK library to make this easier ( https://github.com/grokify/spectrum ).

Disclaimer: We're an early adopter of Stainless at Mux.

I've spent more of my time than I'd like to admit managing both OpenAPi spec files [1] and fighting with openapi-generator [2] than any sane person should have to. While it's great having the freedom to change the templates an thus generated SDKs you get with using that sort of approach, it's also super time consuming, and when you have a lot of SDKs (we have 6 generated SDKs), in my experience it needs someone devoted to managing the process, staying up with template changes etc.

Excited to see more SDK languages come to Stainless!

[1] https://www.mux.com/blog/an-adventure-in-openapi-v3-api-code...

[2] https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator

As a result, the following specification can be used to generate clients in a number of different languages via OpenAPI Generator.

Of course you can compile the server from source if you have Go and the OpenAPI generator JAR (https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator?tab=readme...)

Follow these steps : https://github.com/c100k/rebootx-on-prem/blob/master/.github...

And then :

(cd ./impl/http-server-go && GOARCH=amd64 GOOS=openbsd go build -o /app/rebootx-on-prem-http-server-go-openbsd-amd64 -v)

By adapting the arch if needed. Not tested, but it should work.

TL;DR: Start generating your HTTP clients and all the DTOs of the requests and responses automatically from your API, using openapi-generator instead of writing your own.

As an alternative, you can also use the official OpenAPI Generator, which is a more generic tool supporting a wide range of languages and frameworks.

I trialed generating SDKs using the OpenAPI Generator package, which was largely unsatisfactory.

If Swagger/OpenAPI is available, save yourself a lot of trouble and generate the client using OpenAPI Generator. If not, use a library like RestEase to make it significantly easier to create the client.

For a run of the mill REST API you should generate OpenAPI (Swagger) info for the API using a library like NSwag or Swashbuckle. You'd want to do this no matter what because it's documentation for the API, but the bonus is that you can use it with tools like OpenAPI Generator to create API client code and models in a variety of languages. You certainly can create an API client library manually, it would entail having a nuget package with a class library that contains the models and client code for calling the endpoints (which I'd create using a lib such as RestEase unless you just enjoy writing boilerplate code by hand). However 95% of the time it simply isn't worth creating your own lib when OpenAPI is available because once you've done it a time or two it takes less than 5 min to run the generator and create (or update) a lib.

Then you can use oapi-codegen or openapi-generator to generate the Go (or other language) SDK for it.