laminar VS openapi-code-generator

Yeah also schema-first here. I think this is the “easy vs simple” debate all over again.

Writing code first schema is very easy, but when you start _using_ that api as part of a greater system is where the approach starts falling short.

Schema first allows for great communication between teams - one team requires changes to an api service, they can hash it out with the api, and then go back and implement both the client _and_ server simultaneously.

The great benefit here is the inevitable back-and forth can be done together, as each side might need to adjust the api while they are implementing the client/server as often happens with engineering efforts. And thats a lot easier to do while each side is working on it rather than the usual one side is “done” and moves to another task and needs to go back and modify.

In fact at the time I built quite a nice system of generating typescript types for both client and server - https://github.com/ivank/laminar

I guess because the project tried to introduce strong typing and fp style to node http servers plus a few other ideas stolen from here and there, it tried to do too much and never really got traction.

Whilst it's not as expressive/flexible as typespec, and in my experience it's not always well supported by tooling, you can do $ref's across files in openapi specifications.

Eg: https://github.com/mnahkies/openapi-code-generator/blob/main...

I've become interested in SBOM recently, and found there were great tools like https://dependencytrack.org/ for CycloneDX SBOMs, but all I have is SPDX SBOMs generated by GitHub.

I decided to have a go at writing my own dependency track esque tool aiming to integrate with the APIs GitHub provides.

It's pretty limited in functionality so far, but can give a high level summary of the types of licenses your repository dependencies use, and let you drill down into potentially problematic ones.

Written in NextJS + mui + sqlite, and using another project of mine to generate most of the API boilerplate/glue (https://github.com/mnahkies/openapi-code-generator)

Congratulations on launching, you have some interesting ideas in there.

Using a LLM to generate missing operation ids isn't something I've tried, instead I simply combine http method plus path segments which at least guarantees uniqueness [1]. I do a similar thing for extracting and naming inline schemas based on the operation and media types [2].

How do you prevent naming collisions? And do you find the resulting names to be significantly better than a deterministic approached like I described?

I'll definitely checkout the curated specifications - always useful to get more high quality (and hopefully varied) specifications to test my code generator with, and the lint rules is a great idea - I've had to explain what patterns lend themselves well to code generation many times.

I'm on mobile so may have missed it, but looking at one of your typescript examples I couldn't see any runtime response body validation, is this something you're thinking about?

- [1] https://github.com/mnahkies/openapi-code-generator/blob/main...

Yeah I'm also on the schema first side of the debate.

I think for me it comes down to a few key points:

- APIs are forever, the choice of language/framework is an implementation detail

- Constraining yourself to what can be represented in the specification is better than generating a specification from implementation that may not be capable of expressing the full details

- When working with diverse languages it provides a common ground/language for discussing API changes. Eg: if you have java backend, kotlin android, swift iOS, react/whatever web you can bring everyone together with the spec

- Subjective, but a good spec will include a bunch of documentation and examples that tend to create a lot of noise in the code. I personally prefer to keep this in the spec and the implementation smaller

I think the main counterpoint to this is that you can generate the spec and then take that and change your mind if you later change language/framework etc - it's not a one-way door.

My biggest bug bear is that regardless of spec first or implementation first, you should have something you write once and generate the rest of the glue from (eg: docs, client sdks). Writing each piece manually/independently always leads to drift and bugs.

(I'm working on my own little openapi -> typescript code generator over here https://github.com/mnahkies/openapi-code-generator - eventually plan to support more than typescript, and adding typespec support is something I'm currently considering)