Joda-Beans VS openapi-generator

That means I don't forget about fields (as can happen if you're just doing `person.setX()` all the time). It's easy to see what is what when reading it. I can delete fields I don't want to initialize at the time. Yes, maybe immutable objects are the One True Way, but C# lets me choose (I can label properties with an initializer `init` rather than a setter `set` and then they're immutable).

Kotlin offers stuff like this too because it's really useful toward creating code that's easy to create and maintain. Go also lets you initialize structs in a similar fashion.

Java has come back to us a decade or more late with records. They're not bad, but they're only offering one thing. They don't cover what C#, Kotlin, Go, and other languages have offered for so long.

The annoying thing about Java is that it doesn't feel pragmatic a lot of the time. It feels like the language hates stealing ideas from others. It's Java: people steal ideas from Java, not the other way around. People do crazy things just to get POJOs including Immutables (http://immutables.github.io), AutoValue (https://github.com/google/auto/), Lombok (https://projectlombok.org), Joda Beans (https://www.joda.org/joda-beans/), and maybe more. They generate lots of code at compile time or do funky runtime stuff.

It just feels like Java misses the pragmatic stuff and still kinda doesn't want to handle that. I feel a bit silly harping on things like POJOs and setting data on a new object, but that's a big part of day-to-day stuff and it definitely pushes users away from Java towards languages that seem "better" simply because they don't have Java's oddly strong attachment to not offering simple value objects. Yes, again, records do something - but it feels like Java ignored how people are using Kotlin, Go, C#, and more and didn't go for something that would have been as widely applicable and pragmatic as it could have been.

Java has a lot of great stuff like great GCs (yes), lots of cool research, great performance, and Project Loom is really exciting. I just wish the language would lean a little more practical.

I know I've been talking about properties a bunch, but let's look at Java. Java Beans are terrible - so terrible that the community has a number of workarounds. Immutables (https://immutables.github.io) lets you generate builders, Lombok (https://projectlombok.org) has their annotations that do runtime and IDE magic, there's Joda-Beans (https://www.joda.org/joda-beans/), there's the new Java Records if you want immutable-only and non-compatibility with lots of libraries, there are people using Kotlin for their data classes and Java for other things... Properties are this simple thing that lets C# work with the whole getter/setter pattern without being horribly annoying - there's just this weird { get; set; } thing that I can ignore because I don't care.

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.