5 ms·

Json does have schemas

q3k 6y ago
The JSON schema ecosystem is a mess. json-schema.org is one thing, openapi is another (it uses an 'extended subset' of json-schema.org, which is another way of saying 'incompatible'), there’s also typeschema, and a bunch of other pet projects. There is no official JSON schema RFC, there is no official linking between json-schema.org and the JSON RFC. There is no push to make every language that supports JSON to also support a JSON schema system. Finally, there isn't even a guarantee that all human-readable JSON document specifications can be expressed within a JSON schema in any sensible way.
- devj 6y ago
  OpenAPI 3.1 which was released recently, uses JSONSchema 2020-12 as the primary schema format. The incompatibilities has been completely resolved as of today.
- majkinetor 6y ago
  XML schema is joy ?
jillesvangurp 6y ago
Sure, they are just not that widely used. As in, I've not really encountered much json with schema in the wild in my career. I know it exists (in several forms). Support for schemas in mainstream parsers is pretty much non existent making their use very optional as you pretty much have to jump through hoops to do anything with them. Most people seem to opt not to do that. I never got anything out of xml validation either. It just lead to this ridiculously verbose garbage xml that was even less readable with all the namespace, namespace declarations, etc. Very tedious to write manually as well. Also lots of weirdness doing e.g. xpath or xsl transformations against that. The whole SOAP / web services bubble eventually imploded when people figured that you could send tiny json objects instead via REST. I have many issues. People sending invalid json to my APIs is not one of them. You get a bad request if you do. End of story. Don't don that if you don't like bad requests. It's not a problem that justifies a lot of over engineering. Json, yaml, toml, hocon, etc. are basically all just variants of attempting to send human editable blobs of information. Fine for apis where all of the requests are created by programs. Unfortunately people also abuse them for things like DSLs that are authored by humans. The real problem there is not using a strongly and statically typed language that simply does not allow illegal things. A schema is just a stop gap solution when you don't have that. Kotlin is actually great for creating proper DSLs. You get IDE auto-completion and red squiggly lines when you do it wrong. I think Rust also has some nice syntactical constructs for creating DSLs. Typescript might also emerge as a language that is very suitable for that (with maybe a few more features borrowed from Kotlin). Using a non compiled language with weak typing kind of defeats the purpose. Hence the endless ruby but not quite ruby like DSLs for things like puppet.
deepakarora3 6y ago
Yes it does but as someone else mentioned, it can be really challenging to work with. Its difficult to visualize the structure of the document. Its difficult to program against. This was one of the problems which I wanted to solve when I created unify-jdocs. Agreed that it may not do all the things that JSON schema does but it does all those which are required 90% of the time. Along with other things like not having to generate any model classes (code generation) and being able to read and write any path in a single line of code. And being able to merge JSON documents into another. Strong typing has its pros and cons. In my opinion, for complex JSON documents, going the strongly typed way makes making change difficult in the long run. Think of JSON documents the size of 3000 JSON paths going 10 levels deep etc. You can read more about this Java library at https://github.com/americanexpress/unify-jdocs https://github.com/americanexpress/unify-jdocs.

q3k 6y ago

The JSON schema ecosystem is a mess. json-schema.org is one thing, openapi is another (it uses an 'extended subset' of json-schema.org, which is another way of saying 'incompatible'), there’s also typeschema, and a bunch of other pet projects. There is no official JSON schema RFC, there is no official linking between json-schema.org and the JSON RFC. There is no push to make every language that supports JSON to also support a JSON schema system. Finally, there isn't even a guarantee that all human-readable JSON document specifications can be expressed within a JSON schema in any sensible way.

devj 6y ago
OpenAPI 3.1 which was released recently, uses JSONSchema 2020-12 as the primary schema format. The incompatibilities has been completely resolved as of today.
majkinetor 6y ago
XML schema is joy ?

jillesvangurp 6y ago

Sure, they are just not that widely used. As in, I've not really encountered much json with schema in the wild in my career. I know it exists (in several forms). Support for schemas in mainstream parsers is pretty much non existent making their use very optional as you pretty much have to jump through hoops to do anything with them. Most people seem to opt not to do that. I never got anything out of xml validation either. It just lead to this ridiculously verbose garbage xml that was even less readable with all the namespace, namespace declarations, etc. Very tedious to write manually as well. Also lots of weirdness doing e.g. xpath or xsl transformations against that. The whole SOAP / web services bubble eventually imploded when people figured that you could send tiny json objects instead via REST. I have many issues. People sending invalid json to my APIs is not one of them. You get a bad request if you do. End of story. Don't don that if you don't like bad requests. It's not a problem that justifies a lot of over engineering. Json, yaml, toml, hocon, etc. are basically all just variants of attempting to send human editable blobs of information. Fine for apis where all of the requests are created by programs. Unfortunately people also abuse them for things like DSLs that are authored by humans. The real problem there is not using a strongly and statically typed language that simply does not allow illegal things. A schema is just a stop gap solution when you don't have that. Kotlin is actually great for creating proper DSLs. You get IDE auto-completion and red squiggly lines when you do it wrong. I think Rust also has some nice syntactical constructs for creating DSLs. Typescript might also emerge as a language that is very suitable for that (with maybe a few more features borrowed from Kotlin). Using a non compiled language with weak typing kind of defeats the purpose. Hence the endless ruby but not quite ruby like DSLs for things like puppet.

deepakarora3 6y ago

Yes it does but as someone else mentioned, it can be really challenging to work with. Its difficult to visualize the structure of the document. Its difficult to program against. This was one of the problems which I wanted to solve when I created unify-jdocs. Agreed that it may not do all the things that JSON schema does but it does all those which are required 90% of the time. Along with other things like not having to generate any model classes (code generation) and being able to read and write any path in a single line of code. And being able to merge JSON documents into another. Strong typing has its pros and cons. In my opinion, for complex JSON documents, going the strongly typed way makes making change difficult in the long run. Think of JSON documents the size of 3000 JSON paths going 10 levels deep etc. You can read more about this Java library at https://github.com/americanexpress/unify-jdocs https://github.com/americanexpress/unify-jdocs.