taxilang VS swagger-typescript-api

Under the hood, the tags (and associated query language) are actually Taxi - an OSS meta-language and toolchain we build (and have shared previously).

Taxi is a relatively new entrant in the API space. It's goal is to let developers add simple, (but type-safe) tags into their APIs, so software can understand how different APIs relate to one another.

One of the gripes I have about OpenAPI is that it has a very low signal-to-noise ratio. It was bad in JSON, it's just as bad in YAML, with an added whitespace pedantry.

It's great to see a number of alternatives listed in this thread - there's much more active development in this space then I was aware of, and I hope that some of it gets upstreamed back into OpenAPI.

I'll shamelessly plug our tool in this space - Taxi (https://github.com/taxilang/taxilang), which has a dedicated DSL (not YAML) you can either use standalone, or embeddedd within OpenAPI.

I also happen to think that (for internal teams at least), generating clients on ${apiSpec} is a form of tight coupling, where producer and consumer become tied together. If you can avoid it, you should, as it allows producers and consumers to stay loosely coupled and evolve independetly without the gymnastics of avoiding breaking changes.

I've talked about this before, with proposed solutions.[0]

[0]https://orbitalhq.com/blog/2023-01-16-using-semantic-metadat...

RESTful APIs via swagger-typescript-api

TypeScript API generator via Swagger scheme

You said it yourself — the “official” generator is awful and very hard to modify or extend (well, you didn’t say that, but I’m saying it) and while there are many alternatives, they’re not always easy to find. I had some success with swagger-typescript-api[1], but eventually got tired of it and wrote my own generator. Despite looking around quite a bit at what’s available, I never heard of openapi-codegen, which looks quite good.

[1]: https://github.com/acacode/swagger-typescript-api

A lot of APIs nowadays have a Swagger / OpenAPI spec. You can autogenerate types from that using tools like swagger-typescript-api.

With such a contract your BE team should provide a https://swagger.io/tools/swagger-ui/ where the API definition can easily be viewed and tested. Also you can use generators to basically generate a boilerplate (types for all models, functions for all requests) for the entire API based on a contract: https://github.com/acacode/swagger-typescript-api This his already saved me months of work.. great tool.

If your backend is using Swagger, I'd highly recommend using the package swagger-typescript-api. It auto-generates your types and endpoints for you, based on a swagger.json file, which then simplifies where I store my API calls. The flexibility of this is that I can use these API calls in components, classes, Vuex, etc., and I'm not tied to something that I have to maintain as a UI dev.

If your backend is able to generate Swagger/OpenAPI JSON, you can use https://github.com/acacode/swagger-typescript-api to generate both TypeScript interfaces and an API client from the Swagger JSON.