rweb VS openapi-python-client

rweb is pretty simple. it's based on warp, but with rocket-like #[get("/product/{id}")] which is like Flask's @app.route("/product/").

I wrote a PR this weekend to give FastAPI like UX to rweb! https://github.com/kdy1/rweb/pull/56

This crate has an implementation for the Handler trait which I used to model my own Handler trait for an actix-web Service. Using my own struct which implemented that trait suddenly made the "this is not Send" error messages simple enough to decipher. I was able to get the thing to actually compile, but it required using a few unwrap()s on errors which were not Send. I could probably go back and figure out how to wrap or map those errors to something simpler to make my implementation less fragile, but I was already annoyed enough at this implementation that I was headed toward rweb anyway.

All of that is to say rweb is a possible solution, but not a likely one. The product seems great, and if the code functions as well as the brief examples indicate, this is the best option from a code perspective (oops, spoilers!). Given my concerns about the community, I would have to be comfortable forking and maintaining my own version of this framework in the event that I need changes and can't wait months for a PR to be reviewed. Even if that's not the case, I'll certainly have to write much more complete documentation for my teammates to be able to use this project effectively. I'm not mortally opposed to any of that, but I'd rather avoid it if I can.

On the backend, developers either need to manually document the entire API or rely on auto-generation tools that don’t fully meet their needs. Consumers face the same choice, write code by hand or workaround the bugs in their SDK generator (stated, lovingly, as the maintainer of an OpenAPI client generator). On top of this, these solutions result in inconsistent understandings of the API. Reproducing errors becomes time-consuming and frustrating, which feels like a battle instead of a collaboration. What we need is a shared language to describe how the API works—one that doesn’t add unnecessary layers of abstraction or manual work.

Has anyone tried Kiota, specifically the Python support? How does it compare to https://github.com/openapi-generators/openapi-python-client ?

I think we use these - https://github.com/openapi-generators/openapi-python-client

Thanks for the link, but not necessarily.

How WSDL and the code generation around it worked, was that you'd have a specification of the web API (much like OpenAPI attempts to do), which you could feed into any number of code generators, to get output code which has no coupling to the actual generator at runtime, whereas Pyotr is geared more towards validation and goes into the opposite direction: https://pyotr.readthedocs.io/en/latest/client/

The best analogy that i can think of is how you can also do schema first application development - you do your SQL migrations (ideally in an automated way as well) and then just run a command locally to generate all of the data access classes and/or models for your database tables within your application. That way, you save your time for 80% of the boring and repetitive stuff while minimizing the risks of human error and inconsistencies, while nothing preventing you from altering the generated code if you have specific needs (outside of needing to make it non overrideable, for example, a child class of a generated class). Of course, there's no reason why this can't be applied to server code either - write the spec first and generate stubs for endpoints that you'll just fill out.

Similarly there shouldn't be a need for a special client to generate stubs for OpenAPI, the closest that Python in particular has for now is this https://github.com/openapi-generators/openapi-python-client

However, for some reason, model driven development never really took off, outside of niche frameworks, like JHipster: https://www.jhipster.tech/

Furthermore, for whatever reason formal specs for REST APIs also never really got popular and aren't regarded as the standard, which to me seems silly: every bit of client code that you write will need a specific version to work against, which should be formalized.

Tallying up the results, we get 7/8 "MUST" requirements met. I think that Paperclip + actix-web seems like the most promising candidate. I'm really not opposed to writing the OpenAPI v3 construction myself as I've worked with the structure a fair bit in my openapi-python-client project (shameless plug).

Automatic documentation via OpenAPI, which lets you do things like generate Python code that knows how to talk to your API.