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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

We used to have things called WSDLs and XSD schemas that made it _extraordinarily_ easy to make remote calls. Granted, a bunch of ding dongs never loaded their own WSDL to look at it, creating a bad rap.

We do have:

* WADLs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Application_Description_La...

* JSON Schema:https://json-schema.org/learn/miscellaneous-examples

And when they are available they're incredible, but nobody uses them.

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Swagger/OpenAPI has been reasonably popular for a while: https://swagger.io/docs/specification/v3_0/about/

If you ever tried to read an actual WSDL file, you'd have noticed it was not great.

Yes, having an API type declaration is really important. And yes, somehow a lot of people just don't use those things. But the WSDL was one of the worst standards for that in all times. (And also, it inherited all of the shitness from XML, even the allowing non-deterministic processing and side effects while reading the file.)

Anyway, I'm not really disagreeing on your main point. Read the JSON Schema docs, people, use it.

> Granted, a bunch of ding dongs never loaded their own WSDL to look at it

...

I think one can define a good API or a bad API using WSDLs (as with most commonly used schemas), but I have to say my experience with consuming WSDLs has universally been the latter.

"My theory" is that the ease at which one can turn a function into an exposed, documented API is inversely proportional to the likelihood of it being a quality API. I think automagic annotations which turn functions into JSON APIs obey the same principle, for what its worth.

> that the ease at which one can turn a function into an exposed, documented API is inversely proportional to the likelihood of it being a quality API.

I guess we'll just call this "liampulles postulate of apis"

Json schema is great, we used it at my last job and I've built a fuzzer generating data based on it. So the data passes basic validation, but possibly crashes the backend afterwards. Found lots of problems the first run.

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