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alexarchambault / plotly-scala

Scala bindings for plotly.js
http://plotly-scala.org
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Code generation from plot-schema.json #45

Open sbrunk opened 5 years ago

sbrunk commented 5 years ago

Plotly maintains the declarative json chart schema, which seems to be the authorative source for their API bindings.

See plot-schema.json via API (Firefox renders this nicely as tree) or via GitHub.

plotly.py for instance generates part of its API from plot-schema.json since version 3.0. See also the code generation code for plotly.py. I haven't looked into the other language bindings.

I'm wondering whether makes sense to try a similar approach to generate (part of) the Scala domain code. While this would bring some upfront effort, it might pay of in the long run because of

A possible switch to contraband #44 requires recreating most of the domain code anyway, so it might make sense to consider converting from plotly json schema to contraband directly.

What do you think?

sbrunk commented 5 years ago

I've started working on a proof-of-concept prototype.

alexarchambault commented 5 years ago

@sbrunk Looking forward to what you'll find. I've tended to be a bit wary of code generation stuff, especially if they generate end-user API. That said, switching to contraband would put many definitions in JSON files, so it's likely parts of those can be automatically generated…

Some other things I was thinking about before https://github.com/alexarchambault/plotly-scala/issues/44 were either generating dummy JSON structures from the plotly schema, and feed them to plotly-scala decoders, or tweak the encoders / decoders, so that they can be inspected, and check that some of them have all / most of the fields of the plotly schema.