[JPKab]

algorithmmonkey hit the nail on the head: this sounds a HELL of a lot like WSDL and the WS* method in general. I HATE the WS*. However, I'm not going to knock what they are doing, because it is certainly a noble effort. Could someone who is much smarter than me explain how this would avoid the pitfalls of past attempts at abstracting service layers?

It's interesting to see the approach of abstractable APIs, vs. the other way of making usage of data more automatic, via machine readable semantic markup and embedding metadata into the data structure aka linked data/semantic web.

I think its all awesome.

[alpinegizmo]

With Geekier our primary goal is to make things better for folks, like us, who are building apps using the APIs available today. We've come up with a pragmatic solution that lets us decouple our applications from the APIs we're using. It's pretty simple and doesn't try to solve every conceivable case, which is hopefully how we'll avoid the pitfalls of some past attempts at this.

[cweis]

We're not so much trying to make this an abstraction layer as we want to make this a library of API definitions that are clear, machine- as well as human-readable (to a point) format, that can be made usable by a connection factory instead of making it necessary to generate and maintain libraries.

I hope that addresses some of your questions.