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My experience might be insignificant. I've been working with several APIs, both XML and JSON, and I'm yet to see an example where a schema have helped me writi

My experience might be insignificant. I've been working with several APIs, both XML and JSON, and I'm yet to see an example where a schema have helped me writing an automated parser. Validating the response/request? Sure. Maybe I did not have the right tools, maybe I lacked the knowledge, but the fact is, I've been writing such parsers by hand. I'm vaguely aware that there are various C++ parser generators from XML schemas, but I could not use those because of license/compatibility issues. I suspect it would be possible to write a schema->parser converter using meta-programming, but how many languages are capable of that without huge amounts of pain? I could probably do that in Python or LISP, but not in some other language. And I have not seen a JSON schema being used... anywhere?

twic 11y ago
Someone sent me a WADL file the other day: http://www.w3.org/Submission/wadl/ http://www.w3.org/Submission/wadl/ It didn't take long to find a tool which would generate a client library from it. Three caveats: Firstly, i was working in Java; WADL originated at Sun, so there are Java tools for it, but i doubt any other language has support. Secondly, i don't think it really saved me much time. Hand-coding a JSON API client isn't exactly difficult. The main advantage i can see would be in dealing with an evolving API, where the implementer of the API can continually update a WADL file which clients can use in their build process to stay up to date. Thidly, the generated code had a bug, and blew up on one of the data types returned from the API!