When it comes to designing a web API, OpenAPI is the standard. It’s everywhere, it’s also known under the name Swagger (whatever Swagger product they’re called). But if you have ever written an OpenAPI specification document, I think you would have visited the OpenAPI reference too many times to be comfortable.

OpenAPI is too enormous and hard to write.

OpenAPI is too complicated to write (by hand).

• Describing an API is hard enough. Doing that while having to think about an arbitrary syntax is so unnecessary that I couldn’t concentrate.
• Knowing what you’re supposed to fill in for an OpenAPI object is not trivial. There are Request Body Object, Parameter Object, Schema Object and some more, each one needs a different set of fields.

There are GUIs to ease this pain. I like Stoplight Studio. It’s stylish, and gets things done.

Tools that generate APIs from OpenAPI spec are opinionated, bloated, and limiting.

Take openapi-generator. It takes an OpenAPI spec file and generates server or client code in whatever language or framework that you chose.

However, after I generated an API, I questioned:

• What is this structure that it outputs? Is this best practice that’s taken somewhere? Is it really the best practice? How can I extend from these?
• What are these naming schemes?
• What are these “design patterns”?
• What “customizations” do I have?
• What happens when I want to update my OpenAPI spec? What files should I keep from being overwritten?

I think every OpenAPI generators have the same flaws. I decided to not use one, and manually implement an API. But…

Tools that validate APIs with their OpenAPI spec are not mainstreamed.

I want to know if my implementation is in sync with its OpenAPI spec. But maybe not every validating tool is created equal.

I programmed in Go, so I looked at kin-openapi. To be honest, I don’t even know what I’m looking at. The introduction is as generic as it can be. At least I could maybe find a “recipe” for validating the “HTTP requests/responses”. Still, it lacks clarity as to what it is doing under the hood. If you don’t know what attributes of the requests/responses it’s even validating, why do you use a validation tool?

There might still be a perfect tool for this purpose, but I still have yet to find a mainstreamed-enough tool good enough that it’s as popular as the OpenAPI specification itself. It should be.

The alternatives are sometimes not very good.

I’ve tried Goa, a design-first framework to create web services. It has its own Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that is, I suppose, a set or combination of syntax in Go specific to creating web services. You write a specification in Go, and it generates the interfaces, followed by an implementation to use those interfaces.

First, minor detail, there are limitations in the DSL itself. I encountered a problem where it doesn’t allow a field in the response to be nullable.

Second, the implementation is structured in a way that is very opinionated and unclear to extend upon. I guess it’s a template and I can use my Go imagination to de-magicify them, but oh well.

Third, the middleware system in Goa is so confusing. I don’t know how to fetch any type of params in the Endpoint Middleware. Each type of router has different ways to fetch those, and I don’t know what router Goa uses. At least it’s nowhere found in the Goa documentation.

And, this Security documentation of Goa doesn’t even exist anymore in the current documentation. Just go to goa.design and try to find the Security page on the navigation bar.

After all, Goa is still a framework, and my use case seems to be on the edge cases. Maybe they will address these soon, but I won’t care anymore. I think I’ve had enough for an API framework.

Conclusion

I would for now stick with OpenAPI with GUIs, and manually implement the API. The OpenAPI wonderland hasn’t delivered yet, but I’ll be waiting.