Link dump
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2019/12/02/Strongly-Typed-Events
I was sort of gloomy and negative about the notion of automated mapping between messages on the wire and strongly-typed programming data structures. Since we just launched a Schema Registry, and it’s got my fingerprints on it, I guess I must have changed my mind.
Writing code to map back and forth between bits-on-the-wire and program data structures is a very bad use of developer time.
...most messages are in JSON, and I have repeatedly griped about the opacity and complexity of JSON Schema. So, why am I happy about the launch of a Schema Registry? Because it lets us do two useful things: Search and autocomplete.
Let’s talk about Autocomplete first. When I’m calling an API, I don’t have to remember the names of the events or their arguments, because my IDE does that for me. As of now, this is true for events as well; the IDE knows the names and types of the fields or sub-fields. This alone makes a schema registry useful.