Think about switching the API server from Rails to lua/openresty

[GUI]

As part of the lua branch, the API server is currently still in Rails. However, the more I look at it, the more it seems like our stack could really be simplified and standardized further if this component also switched over to lua/openresty. Then everything would be in Lua/OpenResty, with the default admin app being a standalone ember-cli based app that's just another consumer of the REST API.

I think I'd prefer to defer this until after an initial lua release, to at least get the bulk of the lua improvements finally out there and released. But this is something that could potentially be tackled later on, or even in pieces. Basically, the aim would be to reimplement V1 of the API in a backwards compatible way, so anything consuming the API shouldn't be able to tell the difference.

[brylie]

To this end, are you considering a JavaScript wrapper for the REST API? E.g. an NPM package that overlays the API Umbrella REST.

[GUI]

Like a javascript SDK for the REST APIs? We don't have anything like that planned (I won't think we do much beyond JSON.parse on the responses in our own usage), but presumably you could generate an SDK library from our swagger file. It doesn't look like the swagger-codegen project currently has a generator for client-side javascript, but it looks like there might be a couple of third party options: swagger-api/swagger-codegen#78

[GUI]

And just to clarify, if we re-implement some of our underlying APIs in Lua instead of Rails, that shouldn't impact the usage of the APIs (whether you're hitting them directly or via some wrapper).

[brylie]

OK, cool. I have just written a basic Meteor wrapper. It would be nice for the wrapper to have 'official' support, as I am struggling to implement all of the endpoints. Also, a general NPM module would potentially be useful for many other integration projects.