Praxis is a framework for both designing and implementing APIs.
An important part of the framework is geared towards the design aspect of building an API. This functionality empowers architects with tools to design every last aspect of their API, resulting in a complete, web-browsable documentation, which includes automatic generation of examples for resources, parameters, headers, etc...as well as requests and responses for the supported encodings. The design process is iterative, and flows from defining new resources, parameters, etc...to reviewing the resulting docs (usually with some of the potential clients of the API), back to updating the design based on feedback, or expanding it with more resources. The design language (i.e. DSL) of Praxis follows a clean 'ruby-type-syntax' and its final outcome is to generates an output that is both a set of schema documents as well as a web-based API browser (driven by those schemas). This allows Praxis to design APIs that can potentially be implemented in any language.
Another important part of the framework is geared towards helping in the implementation of the API service. In particular, Praxis provides help to Ruby developers for building a service conforming to the designed API. Aside from Ruby there is also sister-project called Goa that assists in implementing Praxis-like design API using Golang. Since the API design generates schema files very similar in nature to other API document formats like (Swagger, Google Discovery, RAML, etc...) supporting other implementation languages could be easily accomplished in the future by building converters to/from them.
The part of the framework that helps with the ruby service implementation takes an approach that is different from other existing ruby (micro)frameworks such as Grape, Sinatra, Scorched, Lotus or even RailsAPI (now part of Rails). Instead of being developer-centric, it takes an integrated approach treating both designers and implementors as first class citizens throughout the complete API building process. With Praxis you create an API by iterating through the design, review and implementation phases. While Praxis can help Ruby developers in a lot of aspects involved in building a service, the framework is completely componentized as to allow developers to pick and choose which parts to use, which ones not to use, and which other technologies to integrate with. The framework provides help in many areas, for example: all aspects of request and response validation, automatic type-coercion, consistent error-responses, routing and url generation, advanced template/media-type definition and rendering, domain-modeling, optional database ORM (for high-perfomance large datasets), DB integration (with an efficient identityMap), a plugin and extensible framework to easily hook into, available integrations such as newrelic, statsd, etc...
There is a long list of benefits that come from using Praxis. From those, here are a couple of the salient themes:
Praxis alternatives and related gems
Based on the "API Builder" category
* Code Quality Rankings and insights are calculated and provided by Lumnify.
They vary from L1 to L5 with "L5" being the highest. Visit our partner's website for more details.
Do you think we are missing an alternative of Praxis or a related project?
Praxis RecommendationsThere are no recommendations yet. Be the first to promote Praxis!
Have you used Praxis? Share your experience. Write a short recommendation and Praxis, you and your project will be promoted on Awesome Ruby.
Recently added Praxis resources
Be the first to add one!