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Background

I am working on a project where multiple independent system services need to talk to a central service via a well/fully-defined REST API (i.e. via HTTP GET, PUT, and POST requests). There are some complex sets of operations we would like to reduce to a single function and make available to all the services acting as clients to the REST services (i.e. GET from a bunch of different endpoints, combine the results, and execute a POST and PUT to a different/new endpoint).

Problem

All of these system services are written in various programming languages (i.e. C, C++, Go, Node.js, and Python), and we'd like to re-use the same functions in these various project. So far, the most viable approach seems to be to write a library and make it available to the other projects.

  • However, using C as the language to house the code will result in use missing out on certain features most other/newer langaugues support, and will overly complicate the code.
  • If we were to make the library in C++ though, now get to mess around with binding generators which adds more complexity still).
  • We could potentially create an additional REST service (we're not allowed to modify the current one) that acts as an intermediate "agent" to "translate requests" for the other system services, but we'd rather go with a library rather than adding another service, if possible (since we then have to re-define/re-factor the authtentication/security model by having a "proxy" service added to the mix).

Question

Is there a more elegant/maintainable way to allow code re-use amongst multiple projects and programming languages, since all of them just need a way to interpret HTTP calls in the same manner? For example, is this something that protocol buffers (or something similar) could manage?

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  • Just to be clear, you're asking how to write a client you can use from various programming languages, not how to write the REST API itself, right? It shouldn't matter what the REST API is written in. At some point the rubber will meet the road and you'll have to do something language-dependent - you just don't want it to be in the http client. Is that right? – Patrick87 Apr 25 '19 at 19:36
  • Maybe also ask on https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/ – jamieguinan Apr 25 '19 at 20:05
  • @jamieguinan when referring other sites, it is often helpful to point that [cross-posting is frowned upon](https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/cross-posting/info) – gnat Apr 26 '19 at 09:08
  • @gnat duly noted. – jamieguinan Apr 26 '19 at 14:32

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