[Openstack] describing APIs for OpenStack consumers

Ziad Sawalha ziad.sawalha at rackspace.com
Thu Oct 27 00:13:22 UTC 2011


So you would do a diff if the generated WADL against the expected WADL. That would mean we use both. I think that's a reasonable approach.



On Oct 26, 2011, at 12:31 PM, "Monsyne Dragon" <mdragon at RACKSPACE.COM> wrote:

> 
> On Oct 26, 2011, at 10:48 AM, Kevin L. Mitchell wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, 2011-10-25 at 15:30 -0700, Joseph Heck wrote:
>>> It sounds like even though most of us hate WADL, it's what we're
>>> expending effort after to make a consolidated API set. So unless Nati
>>> and Ravi want to switch to using Swagger (or something else), WADL is
>>> the direction we're heading. I totally agree with Daryl that reading
>>> it is a PITA, and am finding (from my part) that the only definitive
>>> way to know about writing the docs and documenting the authoritative
>>> API is to read the underlying code. (which is what I suspect Nati
>>> likely did with the pull request that adds in WADL for the
>>> Nova/OpenCompute extension API)
>> 
>> I wonder if it would be possible to generate much of the WADL from
>> introspecting the code itself...surely the URL structure itself can be
>> extracted from the paste setup, and the XML templates code I recently
>> contributed could easily be traversed to provide at least a basic
>> description of the output.  That could at least provide a starting point
>> for generating WADLs...
>> 
>> (Of course, I propose this, having little idea of what actually goes in
>> a WADL, but still... ;)
> 
> I've worked with WADL and WSDL before, and yes, it is indeed possible to generate the WADL by introspecting code. (with a few decorators/annotations assisting)
> This is what Sandy Walsh is suggesting, and I highly, highly recommend this approach.  Otherwise you have to either generate code from an external WADL, which makes the code a mess, or keep the WADL in sync with the code manually (bleh).  The big advantage of generating WADLs from the code is that you then get a machine-readable description of what the *code* thinks the interface is, not what you *hope* the interface is. That way,  if you look at the generated WADL, and if the interface isn't what it *should* be (as in "Where did THAT resource come from, and where did the foobar param on that GET method go?"), you know you have a bug to fix. 
> 
> --
>    Monsyne M. Dragon
>    OpenStack/Nova 
>    cell 210-441-0965
>    work x 5014190
> 
> 
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