Re: [httpapi] Discussion about JSON payloads and code generation

[Darrel Miller <[e-mail]>]

Hi Christoph,

From: httpapi <[e-mail]> on behalf of Christoph Kappestein <[e-mail]>

I would like to gauge whether there is some interest in discussing ways to describe JSON payloads with a focus on code generation on this WG. Also it would be interesting to gather feedback from other developers who have experiences in this space.

As an editor of the OpenAPI spec, that relies heavily on JSON Schema, consider my perspective to be heavily biased here. But I do agree wholeheartedly that JSON Schema has challenges when it comes to describing types for code generation.  However, I would be reluctant to go down a path of defining a new specification for describing types.

The recent Postman developer survey https://www.postman.com/state-of-api/ found that in their 13,000 respondents, 75% of them claimed to be users of JSON Schema.  Convincing developers to move to a different format is going to require a compelling alternative.

What would be awesome to see is if a community could form around creating a new JSON Schema vocabulary that targets type description.  JSON Schema itself is now defined by a set of vocabularies, one of which is the validation vocabulary.  I know the JSON Schema core team have been looking for someone to spearhead this effort.   https://github.com/json-schema-org/json-schema-vocabularies

By taking this approach, the existing JSON Schema specifications and artifacts can be leveraged, and the new type definition keywords could be used alongside the validation keywords.

Darrel