paperclip VS openapi-python-client

The first bit I tried was following pieces of the official actix-web tutorial in order to get a tiny little web server started locally. This went fine, but was actually a big mistake as that tutorial teaches you to use macros to define endpoints which, at the time of writing, Paperclip does not support.

The biggest issue with Paperclip is that it only currently supports OpenAPI v2. There is work in progress to add v3 support, but it's just that: in progress. This means that if I really want to supplant FastAPI with this actix-web w/ Paperclip combo, I'm going to have to write my own v3 implementation. There is a GitHub Issue which talks about the intended strategy for achieving this being somehow based on converting a v2 spec to v3. I'm not sure how possible this will be considering there are some important features missing from v2. It makes more sense to me for this to be a different feature via cargo flag (or at least a different module).

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.