ExApi - a library for creating and managing apis and their implementations

Elixir module APIs, or web APIs? (Sorry for the stupid questions )

@aseigo: no problem, I don’t described this library yet

This library will allow you to declare api/implementation/feature similarly to protocol/implementation/function. My implementations are identified by atom and all will be fully dynamically. For example you could register api or implementation when you want (dynamically loaded files), so you load Elixir code on yourself and call register specified module … and there is much more …

Aha! I see. Thanks for the explanation. Sounds very neat, I will check it out for sure when it is released!

Sounds like a plugin system then eh?

@OvermindDL1: hmm, at least it’s not intended

I’m using GenServer that in init function reads configuration and automatically initializes apis and their implementations saving them to state. I added extra possibility to register api and implementation at runtime, because you wrote that it could be useful. As you said scanning beam files is not so easy as it originally looks, so what you need to do is just load something (beam file json, or somethimg else) and fetch/generate from them api and implementations definitions. Finally you need only to register them. I have also one extra feature: when some async calls (like registration api or implementation) are executed asynchronously then ExApi dispatch event using ^Register.dispatch/2.

I’d been meaning to make a plugin API for elixir, I was thinking of doing a registration and just letting plugins that get loaded into the system register themselves into it.

Sounds cool though. Looking forward.

@OvermindDL1: As soon as you can compile file with my library as dependency (especially macros) then you can register them. Of course name your api how you would like. API could be named MyApp.Plugin and then you can write MyApp.Loader that simply compiles file, gets file name (as plugin identificator) and register that plugin as a MyApp.Plugin implementation.

I’m making this firstly because I don’t want to implement protocol for empty structs that does not look good - at least for me.

/me coughs

@OvermindDL1: I saw it, but my is little different. I need to write one mix task and add some tests then I release it and you will see my idea. It could be great if you can review my code especially my work on macros, because it’s first time I’m working on them so much.

@OvermindDL1: I’m writing tests for it now.
You said that working on *.beam files is not good way in some situations (edge-cases).
I’m using: &Code.load_file/2 to load .ex file from test/fixtures/ project directory. This file contains only import call (for calling macro to define api) + of course call that macro - nothing more.
Then I’m using my register method passing only module name. This calls only one auto-generated API function and only work on data that this method returns - no beam or other files are used here.
Is it what you want when you said about dynamically load files or should I test it in another way?