openapi-generator VS aiosql

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.

> resort to raw SQL

I'm the opposite, I would rather write SQL than "resorting to" ORM queries, which is why my favourite libraries are aiosql[1] in Python, Hugsql[2] in Clojure and similar: write the queries as SQL in .sql files, which then get exposed as functions to your code.

[1] https://nackjicholson.github.io/aiosql/

[2] https://www.hugsql.org/

I prefer to use aiosql https://nackjicholson.github.io/aiosql/ to organize my SQL and have it in a SQL folder. It looks like this where colons specify variables:

I tend to do a lot of data-heavy projects, so I tend to eschew ORM-style code and use a project called aiosql to bind raw SQL to python methods, and offload as much expensive computation to the DB as possible. If I'm prototyping an endpoint (e.g. calculating percentiles for some midsized time-series data), and just need a non-performant working placeholder, it's extremely easy to dump a SQL table to pandas and yeet something together in a few lines - then smoothly replace it with a more performant SQL query down the road. Highly contextual move, but I find it to be an awesome balancing point between flexibility, scalability, performance, productivity, etc.

As one of the rare Python developers who actually like SQL, my favourite database library is aiosql

Only slightly off-topic, poking around in there led me to aiosql, which takes an idea I'd had and jumps forward a good long way. :-)

I've been doing something in this vein for a big personal project, using this python library: https://nackjicholson.github.io/aiosql/.

In short, I'm using a run of the mill stack (Caddy/Gunicorn/Flask/Postgres) - but with the twist that all my core logic is defined in plaintext SQL files, which get bound into namespaced Python methods by aiosql. Routing, error handling, templating, etc. are all done in Python - but all data manipulation and processing are outsourced to the DB level. All database object definitions are laid out in a massive, idempotent "init_db" method that gets called at launch, so I can essentially point the app at a fresh instance of Postgres and rebuild from scratch. The design is primarily driven by my personal distaste for ORMs, but I've found it extremely beneficial in terms of rigid typing, integrity checks, and performance.

Definitely check out https://nackjicholson.github.io/aiosql/ if you want to stick with SQL

I took that approach on my latest Flask project and it’s gone quite swimmingly. The problem I ran into was that a lot of the ecosystem, and therefore documentation, blog posts, helper libraries, etc., are all written under the assumption that you’re using an ORM. It took a while to figure out how to work around that, but once I did, I was home clear.

I also used a helper library to automatically map namespaced .sql files onto python functions with various return types, which made the development process way more elegant: https://nackjicholson.github.io/aiosql/. Absolute game changer if you plan to go this route - can’t recommend it highly enough.

I've been using FastAPI for some time, and now I'm using it as a full web framework (not just for REST APIs). I like writing SQL without ORMs, so the combination of aiosql[0] + FastAPI + Jinja2 works great. Add HTMX[1] and even interactive websites become easy.

That's in fact the stack I am using to build https://drwn.io/ and I couldn't enjoy it more.

Thanks Sebastián for creating it!

[0] https://github.com/nackjicholson/aiosql