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Last updated : Nov 30, 2017
NOT ON THE CURRENT EDITION
This blip is not on the current edition of the Radar. If it was on one of the last few editions, it is likely that it is still relevant. If the blip is older, it might no longer be relevant and our assessment might be different today. Unfortunately, we simply don't have the bandwidth to continuously review blips from previous editions of the Radar. Understand more
Nov 2017
Hold ?

Back in the days when SOAP held sway in the enterprise software industry, the practice of generating client code from WSDL specs was an accepted—even encouraged—practice. Unfortunately, the resulting code was often complex, untestable, difficult to modify and frequently didn't work across implementation platforms. With the advent of REST, we found it better to evolve API clients that use the tolerant reader pattern for extracting and processing only the fields needed. Recently we have observed a disturbing return to old habits with developers generating code from API specifications written in Swagger or RAML—a practice that we refer to as spec-based codegen. Although such tools are very useful for driving the design of APIs and for extracting documentation, we caution against the tempting shortcut of simply generating client code directly from these specifications. The chances are that such code will be difficult to test and maintain.

Mar 2017
Hold ?

Back in the days when SOAP held sway in the enterprise software industry, the practice of generating client code from WSDL specs was an accepted—even encouraged—practice. Unfortunately, the resulting code was often complex, untestable, difficult to modify and frequently didn't work across implementation platforms. With the advent of REST, we found it better to evolve API clients that use the tolerant reader pattern for extracting and processing only the fields needed. Recently we have observed a disturbing return to old habits with developers generating code from API specifications written in Swagger or RAML—a practice that we refer to as spec-based codegen. Although such tools are very useful for driving the design of APIs and for extracting documentation, we caution against the tempting shortcut of simply generating client code directly from these specifications. The chances are that such code will be difficult to test and maintain.

Published : Mar 29, 2017

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