I was looking at ChatGPT plugins today and they use the OpenAPI convention. Is it called OpenAPI because it was created by "Open"AI or it's something completely independent of OpenAI that they chose to adopt?
But OpenAPI is the “gold standard” machine readable API specification format so it makes sense that OpenAI would rely on it!
I remember when that would have been WSDL, with something like SoapUI - where you'd feed in the service description file from whatever service you want to interact with and would get a functional API client. It also had codegen that let you end up with full client stubs in Java or another language, or are able to generate the WSDL file from your server code as well: https://www.soapui.org/docs/soap-and-wsdl/working-with-wsdls...
It's nice to see OpenAPI/Swagger finally catching up, because to me the codegen aspects felt insufficient there for the longest time - if your server code determines what responses to requests it will return, why on earth would you ever want to write the OpenAPI specs manually? It's the same as with ORMs - if you already have a database schema setup on a server somewhere (with SQL migrations, say with dbmate), all of your local entity mappings should be easily generated in a schema-first approach, you shouldn't have to write a single line of code for that.
The latest service I'm building is in .NET and they actually have that covered really nicely: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/gett...
And the Rider IDE there also has nice schema-first tooling, even if a bit niche: https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2022/01/31/entity-framewor...
Model driven development and codegen feel like they definitely belong for boilerplate heavy uses cases like this, where you can also almost perfectly describe the end result that you need based on what you have!
I've seen a lot of hate on WSDLs throughout the years but they were honestly really productive for getting work done.
I do find myself accidentally saying one and meaning the other, in both directions too!