API Strategy & Practice Conference 2018

Automated generation of SDKs is a tricky challenge; on one hand you want to keep SDKs lean with minimal code and dependencies and on the other hand you want to allow API providers to customize the generated code according to the needs of their developers such that SDKs can be more than mere language wrappers of an API.

In this talk, we'll learn how code generation engines work, how an API wrapper is different from an SDK, and how production-ready Code Samples can be created. We'll also cover a technique to allow code customizations without letting API providers be bogged down in manual efforts. 

Writing code to interact with networked APIs, either for internal systems or for third parties, is often tedious, time-intensive, and error prone. Consider code generation.

Code generation is a useful approach for building, maintaining, and distributing code based on the specification of an API, reducing error and allowing libraries to automatically update as the API interface changes.

However, existing code generators may not feel entirely sufficient for your use case. Perhaps you need a special feature, or need support in a different language or framework.

The good news is, code generation is not as hard as you think. In fact, it is remarkably straightforward if given a good data model. This talk will explore how to think about your API's data model, when it is wise to write your own code generator, and how to build a code generator to meet your -- and your customer's -- needs.