XML description of the API for automatically generating clients?

lispnik

Has anyone at Smugmug thought to provide an XML description of the Smugmug API instead of providing it though the wiki? As a Smugmug client author, I could apply an XSL transform to such a XML description and generate my API directly from that. Benifits include never having to update my code when new features in Smugmug's API become available.

The Selenium project takes exactly this approach. They have an iedoc.xml file which contains a description of the Selenium RC API. Then for each of their language bindings (Ruby, Python, Java, Perl, ...) they have an XSL which generates the corresponding code.

As an example, here's the iedoc.xml they use: http://common-lisp.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/cl-selenium/iedoc-0.8.3-1879.xml?root=cl-selenium

If I got one started, would Smugmug accept it perhaps? If I created one and hosted it myself, it would still suffer from always being out of sync with the official API description on the wiki...

devbobo

i'm in the process of developing something at the moment. Hopefully it will be ready in a few weeks.

Cheers,

David

lispnik

devbobo wrote:

i'm in the process of developing something at the moment. Hopefully it will be ready in a few weeks.

That's great to hear. Can I assist somehow? Road test it by generating APIs with it perhaps or divide up the task of describing the API?

devbobo

lispnik wrote:

That's great to hear. Can I assist somehow? Road test it by generating APIs with it perhaps or divide up the task of describing the API?

i'm generating it directly from the api codebase, that way it will be automatically reflected when the api is changed.

lispnik

Hi devbobo, I wonder if you got far with that project?