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 _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~openstack Post to : openstack@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~openstack More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp