Why

I have a crush on interfaces. Thinking about a system in terms of the interfaces it implements is the single best way I've found to focus on the essential complexity of the system. Functions and data. No implementation details.

My goals for this project are:

• Provide an easy way to document interfaces that both humans and computers can read
• Make it easy to get started, but provide enough power to model real systems
• Be fun and idiomatic to use from dynamic and static languages
  • No code generator required for dynamic languages
  • Runtime service discovery can lead to self-configuring clients powered by interface metadata

Roadmap

Barrister currently provides a way to express a type system for an interface and validate that requests and responses comply with that type system. Future possibilities for development include:

• Validation
  • Enhance the IDL to allow expression of required fields, min/max values, regexp, etc
  • JSON Schema is one possibility, although it's a huge spec
• More transports and serialization formats
  • Main motivation would be performance. HTTP/JSON works well for public APIs, but if you want to route requests internally behind a firewall, you might want something faster. ZeroMQ+MessagePack is one clear option.

Who are You?

I'm James Cooper of Seattle, WA. I do freelance hacking as bitmechanic. Nice to meet you.