MadeOfTech.SmartAPI 1.4.0

SmartAPI

Have you ever wondered?

Have you ever thought to yourself that the code of all APIs is furiously alike? Whether you spend more time copying and pasting to transform HTTP queries to SQL requests? That everyone who contributes to the project will write the content of the OpenAPI documentation in a different way?

If the answer to each of these questions is yes, the following should interest you!

Introduction

Purpose

This project is a middleware helping people to build automatically, a complete RESTful API and its documentation, based upon database structure. This way, CRUD method will be generated to map operation to database command. This approach offer consistency in API developpement, eases the maintenance and evolution and moreover, decreases by a big factor, bugs.

Why ?

It's been a few years now that in the different companies where I worked, we published tons af API. From my point of view, we've never made any effort to be time efficient... and especially since the advent of REST.

When we were using SOAP, API specifications could always be weird : idempotency was a concept, not a rule, we were publishing methods and the way we were implementing actions could be esoteric. But since REST, things have changed.

REST is a fantastic approach since operations described are simple : create, read, update and delete. All of these verbs are more or less related to the traditionnal vocabulary of SQL, INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE and DELETE. More or less only, since CREATE can be done thru POST and PUT verbs. But, let's get optimistic : why continue to write code that take a REST request to transform it into a SQL request ? From my point of view, it was sufficient to automate database access based upon verb and ressource used in the request.

Automation could also be the opportunity to presents every API the same way, to have an exhaustive documentation about objects, arrays and error codes, a generic approach to collections and members, and a way to manage json and xml without any more line of code. But overall, it could be the opportunity to implement selection on collections, based upon a simple query langage named FiQL. Automate could be the opportunity to do all of this without any code, effort, nor complexity.

And, i did it ? You want to know how ? Let's continue !

Technical overview

For more details, go to Github.

Author

• Fabien Philippe - Initial work - GitHub, LinkedIn

Special thanks

I warmly thank API-K, and more particularly Pascal Roux for its trust and for the time he left me to complete this project!

License

Copyright 2020 Fabien Philippe

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.