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Ask HN: SaaS Idea: SDK Generation for API's (OpenAPI / gRPC)

4 points by TeeWEE ↗ HN
What do you think of an SaaS company that generates client SDK's for your API (Open API / GRPC):

You just upload your api spec (OpenAPI.yml / GRPC spec). Pick your output SDK languages Wait for the pipeline to complete and get your SDK's..

The SDK's could already be deployed to a dependency manager of the SDK target language...

Do you think this would work? Would your company pay for this, if so how much?

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Background:

I've build and consumed api's. GRPC / OpenAPI / GraphQL... With GRPC the protoc client generating is super nice. However with OpenAPI, openapigenerator requires some tweaking... But worst of all, i have to setup the pipelines to generate the SDK's myself...

I think it would be very valuable to build a startup around it. I've already seen gendocu.com trying to build something like this for GRPC. Which I love!

9 comments

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wizwit999
I think there's a few in this space but they're all kinda meh. I actually had this idea a while back but I'm working on something else now.

Done well, its a decent idea, I'd pay for it in my current company.

I actually got the idea because I was impressed that AWS internally has a really mature model first docs and SDK generation tech. They've actually opensourced parts of it (https://awslabs.github.io/smithy/) but it's not ready for use yet.

TeeWEE
Seems like Smithy is mostly for internal use at AWS:

"Why not just use an existing IDL?" "Existing IDLs available outside of AWS were not extensible enough to meet our needs and not compatible with our existing services."

Their support also seems limited: https://awslabs.github.io/smithy/implementations.html

NicoJuicy
Swaggerhub does most of this
TeeWEE
Seems Swaggerhub mostly deals with documentation, not SDK generation: https://swagger.io/tools/swaggerhub/features/
NicoJuicy
https://support.smartbear.com/swaggerhub/docs/apis/generatin....
mooreds
TIL! It looks like it does support client lib generation: https://support.smartbear.com/swaggerhub/docs/apis/generatin...

It doesn't say which tier that is available in: https://swagger.io/tools/swaggerhub/pricing/ nor does it handle uploading the SDK to a dependency manager site (that I can see) but that gives you an indication of the pricing structure and possible demand.

NicoJuicy
It's opensource. I ran it in the past locally to test it, so it should still work i think.

It's quite easy to create a library to your own flavor. The default is kinda "meuh" for .net.

It downloads a .zip file that you can use then. Should be able to automate with some work/language.

mooreds
As someone who just released an OpenAPI spec for our API and struggled with building client libraries to test that the spec was correctly generated, I'd pay for this, especially if it integrated with the rubygems/packagists/nugets of the world.

Let me know if you want an alpha or beta tester. Our OpenAPI spec is here: https://github.com/fusionauth/fusionauth-openapi and my contact info is in my profile.

m3h
That's something that we are doing at APIMatic already.

APIMatic[1] is a Code-Generation-as-a-Service[2] that generates SDKs for C#, Python, PHP, Ruby, TypeScript and Java from OpenAPI specs (and more formats). We help companies create a better Developer Experience[3] for their APIs using SDKs and API Documentation that are always up-to-date with the API implementation. We have a pretty solid customer base[4] and SDKs generated using APIMatic have been downloaded millions of times.

PS: My email is in my profile.

[1] https://www.apimatic.io

[2] https://alpha.apimatic.io/continuous-code-generation/

[3] https://www.apimatic.io/developer-experience-portal

[4] https://alpha.apimatic.io/success-stories/