HN user
Yeah, it's a common problem with non deterministic api schemas, e.g. openapi and swagger (https://swagger.io/specification/), but Taxi looks similar in some aspects to protoforce (https://www.protoforce.io/) except that the types subset is substantially narrower.
gRPC is quite counter-ergonomic with its own set of issues when trying to map a business domain to actual solutions.
protoforce.io has better modeling and implementation design, supports also 2-way communication, while remaining sane to read and debug.
/disclaimer: one of the authors
We were bothered by the same thing :) Many plugins for OpenAPI had no codegens which would produce deterministic behavior for compatibility across various languages. Also we wanted to have something that could express complex business domains in definitions.
Ended up building protoforce.io for the very purpose. It does support typescript + nodejs, which we used for the website itself as well.
For protoforce, we provide completely asynchronous server and client SDKs for scala and nodejs, also we suport websockets as a transport.
Java sdk is built on Futures, so somehow it's async as well.
Also we support server-to-client calls, which, effectively, are a better alternative to callbacks.
Noted, thank you.
We focused on the desktop because it is difficult to use from mobile due to it being an online IDE. I'll take a look, thank you for reporting.
Thank you.
1. Scala, Typescript/Javascript, and Java at the moment.
2. It does provide the runtime which allows to bootstrap a server easily. (You can check out this post which has modeling + scala setup example at the bottom https://www.protoforce.io/ProtoForce/post/extensive-guide-to...)
3. Please take a look at the documentation, it has a good outline of the features supported. There are many features, most are well documented there.
4. No, not really. You can do with other languages, it provides both client & server sides, so no other language is needed. Again, you can still generate client side stuff for other languages and use them to connect to your server.
5. protoforce website was implemented using the protoforce DSL itself. The parser and transpilers are written in scala. The portal is written in typescript + react.
6. There is currently a sandbox at the website which you can experiment in. There is no currently integration with other IDEs, but language server can be added a bit later for VSCode for instance.
Hope this answers a bit :)
We've built a similar thing at https://www.protoforce.io, which auto-generates client and server side. It actually transpiles, parsing the models definitions and emits actual code with a bit of shared runtime.
Good amazon opened up their stuff, there should be more competition on this front.
I think there is a trend for a set of tools which auto-generate stuff. It started back with web tools generating websites from WYSIWYG, now it is getting everywhere.
We build services and models using https://www.protoforce.io, which also auto-generates client and server side. Generally, it is impossible to generate good code using templates only, so it has to be transpiled.
I think from amazon's side it was coming sooner or later anyway, with the amount of APIs they have - it is inevitable. I just can't see how many teams you need to have to manage all of the client side code for many languages.