Introduction

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Webwire is a contract-first API system which features an interface description language, a network protocol and code generator for both servers and clients.

This repository contains the documentation sources used to generate the website at https://webwire.dev/.

Resources

The webwire interface description language describes service endpoints and how they are called.
The webwire protocol is the actual representation how data is transferred between client and server.
The webwire code generator uses the schema language to generate client and server stubs.
The webwire library is language specific and is used together with the code generated by the webwire code generator to write servers and clients using that interface.

Webwire generates client and server code which is ready to run. The generated code contains everything to make requests and implement services.
Webwire supports both stateless unidirectional communication and and stateful bidirectional communication. This makes it a perfect fit for application that require some kind of real-time update from the server without the client having to poll for updates.
Webwire validates requests and responses. If data does not match the given schema an error is raised an the data is not processed any further.
Webwire is modelled after programming languages and not after a serialization format. Therefore types like UUID, Date and Time are part of the specification even if the used serialization format does not support them. When using a serialization format which does not support those types natively (e.g. JSON) they are encoded as string. This is transparent to the user of webwire.
Webwire has a special type called fieldset. Fieldsets can be used to construct a struct out of another struct by picking a subset of fields. This is especially useful when designing APIs where multiple endpoints use almost the same structure which just differs in a few fields.

Webwire can not be used to describe existing APIs. Webwire only makes sense as a whole package. The IDL, protocol, code generator and libraries all make a complete package and leaving out one or the other just doesn't make any sense. If you need to document an existing API have a look at OpenAPI.