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by krsyoung 3658 days ago
I agree with this post. I very rarely consider using a service's API without a client library. Taking the load off authentication and marshaling is incredibly valuable in my development workflow. Granted, sometimes simple REST endpoints are OK if they are public / don't need complicated authentication.

I think the major benefits of client libraries is the ability for a developer to stay within their programming language / business domain and not stray into the fun of HTTP and JSON.

Curious how much burden this makes for providers though and what people have done to streamline the testing of the various client libraries with different versions of the service.
1 comments
smt88 3658 days ago
> Curious how much burden this makes for providers though

If those providers document their APIs using the Swagger format, there are tools that will automatically generate SDKs in tons of popular languages. The burden is nearly zero.

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allthingsapi 3658 days ago
Does that count as an SDK? - simple code generation out of a spec? - Most SDKs exist because the provider is hiding some ugly code or making a number of primitive API calls to assemble the response. Aren't we falling back into the old "software" practices and now have to maintain code for anyone that users our service? - wasn't it supposed to be a service?
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smt88 3657 days ago
> Does that count as an SDK?

A lot of big companies publish what they call an SDK, which is really just a thin, idiomatic wrapper on top of HTTP calls. Most of the AWS SDKs are like this, and sometimes the wrapper is way too thin (see: the disastrous mess that is the Dynamo JS library).

Should SDK mean more than that? I don't know. Is that kind of SDK useful? Definitely! HTTP is untyped, slow, and potentially tricky to use (like with OAuth 1.2), so it's nice to have some native code that abstracts that stuff away.

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krsyoung 3658 days ago
Good point, think they are broadly used? My experience with the SDK generation has been hit or miss but the intention is good!
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smt88 3657 days ago
We use the SDK generators at my company, and our partners use the SDKs. They seem to work fine.

If you get into some edge cases, it can be trickier, but it's easy to parse Swagger docs and generate your own SDK from the docs themselves.

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