I’ve been developing a lot of web services lately. I usually do this with Okapi and web.py.
Somehow the tasks for creating a web service are always more or less the same.
- Specify URL schema
- Validate input parameters
- Request data: either from a database or from at least one other web service
- Identify output format using URL or HTTP headers
- Output data in the correct format
And I think that even web.py doesn’t do a good enough job of making this easy and really fast.
I’m starting to think that a DSL might be the correct way to that. The only project I know which partially does that is ActiveWebService from the Ruby on Rails project.
I just hacked together two very simple prototypes of how such service specification could look. I’m interested in two things:
- Does something like that exist already?
- Is it a stupid idea?
See my two examples derived from real services I developed inside local.ch:
- Meteo - providing weather forecast data which is written regularly into a database (by a process not defined here).
- Wintersport - a service providing information about skiing locations based on data from MySwitzerland