Hi all,
Edouard has been working on adding payloads to our push messages and
we were having a bit of a discussion about how to define these payloads.
This is becoming relevant to FxA and to Sync, hence I'm copying both lists.
When defining the data in a payload for a certain message, both the
server and the client must agree on the format. Initially we can manage
this in an ad-hoc basis, but I'm not sure this scales particularly well.
Somewhat inspired by the new telemetry data pipeline, I'm wondering if
we should consider moving towards using JSONSchema (json-schema.org) to
define our payloads? The benefits I see here are:
* A single format that the client and server can use to describe and
agree on the data being exchanged. We'd need to agree on a canonical
location for a single schema that the client and server agree on, but
that's probably doable.
* Eventually unit tests on both the client and server could use this
schema to validate the messages they send (or expect to receive). This
would also be useful when mocking - eg, unit tests in the browser could
confirm that the mocked data (ie, data we pretend came from the server)
also conforms to the schema, to help validate that we are indeed testing
data that looks like what the server actually sends.
* All data can be validated without knowing the contents of the message.
* All messages are likely to be somewhat consistent, given someone will
need to define the schema and will use as reference other existing schemas.
This is somewhat aspirational (ie, I'm not suggesting we would do all
that work up-front), but there's already a bug on file to perform
client-side schema validations for telemetry (bug 1249925) and we could
possibly piggy-back off that work for the client side.
Does anyone think this is worthwhile, or am I over-thinking the problem
at hand and ad-hoc management of the payload definitions is OK?
Cheers,
Mark
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