Philosophy and Concept

APIs are a cornerstone of many applications - they provides means for parties such as application developers or customers to access your services and are often the 'face' of the product.

Even the best of intentions, designs and implementations are often defeated by the sheer grinding force of day-to-day operations; Services change, developers come and go, integrations are formed and abandoned and the effort of maintaining our APIs in these conditions grows ever larger.

Badly written or poorly maintained APIs frustrate everyone - they create constant friction where there should be none.

Gleece aims to alleviate these pressures by providing quick and simple yet powerful development workflows whilst taking care of most of the 'dirty' maintenance work for you.

Gleece's distinction is that it achieves this in an almost purely design-time manner.

By combining rich, fully deterministic, code analysis faculties with industry standard tools and libraries (such as the excellent libopenapi) and a templating system, Gleece is able to generate, prior to build, fully working router code and matching OpenAPI schema.

This allows us to generate optimized, reflection-free (depending on configuration - the internal validator can use it) code that is similar to human-written code in that it is completely readable and deterministic and can perform a wide range of tasks that would otherwise require large amounts of boilerplate or fragile code.

By reducing the amount of boilerplate code developers have to write and engage with, we can significantly reduce the risk for several major pitfalls of API maintenance:

Missing authentication/authorization
Mismatched types/structs
Missing or mismatched documentation
Invalid OpenAPI schemas
Spaghetti code

But that's only part of the story; APIs, especially enterprise grade, require a whole slew of highly specialized features, often uniquely tailored to the specific application, or, put plainly, the worst thing a framework can do is prevent you from getting work done your way.

As such, we've designed Gleece to be almost entirely un-opinionated and highly extensible. It Supports:

Most major routers in a "bring your own router" manner.
Various 'hooks' that can be run at different stages of each request such as before/after/on error.
Template extensions which allow for quick and precise behavioral controls without sacrificing compatibility with future updates
Template overrides which confer the ability to perform sweeping/low granularity changes over the generated routes such as the addition of telemetry.
Template context injections - combined with template overrides, allows you to effectively develop custom annotations and behaviors to intimately tailor each and every aspect of the generated routes.
Extremely thin, no-dependency runtime layer - you are in full control of your dependencies (SSDLC, anyone?)

If you've read this far - thank you!

We hope you enjoy working with Gleece