I work on a large C# platform that interops with a ton of vendor API's, the majority of which are also written in typed languages. The disjointed, loosely coupled nature of web systems
is what causes problems. In particular, knowing what a "correct input" is to web systems is very difficult, where correct means:
3) Passes business rules (it might be correct types, lengths etc, but fails anyway because of an incorrect combination of API calls)
Some of our vendors use Elixir, some use PHP, many use C# or Java. I really don't notice any significant difference between them on that account. The issues are all down to the complexity of the software and business requirements and that the whole thing is a giant distributed system.
> knowing what a "correct input" is to web systems is very difficult
I cut my teeth programming an XML web service using soap and while I can't say that it was as drop-dead simple as a restful HTTP web api these days, between the wsdl and the uddi, it sure was convenient to be able to know as a client what methods were being exposed and what inputs they expected.
Sometimes I wish the w3c had not required XML for those web services ,so that we could do that with json plus whatever add-ons can make it have an enforceable schema like XML. WSDLs were underrated.
I agree. It was nice being able to grab the WSDL from say, a .NET web service, and run your maven script on your Java app to generate the interop boilerplate and just start coding against a type-safe interface.
I work on a large C# platform that interops with a ton of vendor API's, the majority of which are also written in typed languages. The disjointed, loosely coupled nature of web systems is what causes problems. In particular, knowing what a "correct input" is to web systems is very difficult, where correct means:
1) Passes the API's immediate validation
2) Passes validation inside API's longer running processes
3) Passes business rules (it might be correct types, lengths etc, but fails anyway because of an incorrect combination of API calls)
Some of our vendors use Elixir, some use PHP, many use C# or Java. I really don't notice any significant difference between them on that account. The issues are all down to the complexity of the software and business requirements and that the whole thing is a giant distributed system.