Few folks in here are (rightly) frustrated with the code generation story and broader tooling support around the OpenAPI standard. I've found a few alternative approaches quite nice to work with:
- Use a DSL to describe your service and have it spit out the OpenAPI spec as well as server stubs. In other words, I wouldn't bother writing OpenAPI directly - it's an artifact that is generated at build time. As a Go user, I quite like Goa (https://goa.design/) but there are others shared in here like TypeSpec.
- There are situations where sticking a backend-for-frontend (BFF) in front of APIs can yield great productivity boosts. For example, in the past we built a thin GraphQL proxy that calls out to a poorly structured REST API. Integrating with that was much more convenient. Most recently, I've been playing with a BFF built with tRPC (https://trpc.io/) which calls out to a REST API. It seemed to provide an even better experience if you use TypeScript on the front-end and in the BFF. It does not have a codegen step and I was really pleased with how fast I could iterate with it - granted it was a toy project.
- Use a DSL to describe your service and have it spit out the OpenAPI spec as well as server stubs. In other words, I wouldn't bother writing OpenAPI directly - it's an artifact that is generated at build time. As a Go user, I quite like Goa (https://goa.design/) but there are others shared in here like TypeSpec.
- There are situations where sticking a backend-for-frontend (BFF) in front of APIs can yield great productivity boosts. For example, in the past we built a thin GraphQL proxy that calls out to a poorly structured REST API. Integrating with that was much more convenient. Most recently, I've been playing with a BFF built with tRPC (https://trpc.io/) which calls out to a REST API. It seemed to provide an even better experience if you use TypeScript on the front-end and in the BFF. It does not have a codegen step and I was really pleased with how fast I could iterate with it - granted it was a toy project.