Blacksmith

Blacksmith

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Blacksmith is a library to build a solid microservices architecture based on REST API.

Todays, developers have lots of choices to create microservices, plenty of framework are available, but when it comes to consume them, there is a lack of clients.

Consuming an API is not just about doing HTTP requests, it has to be designed for failure, monitoring, and service discovery with an elegant abstraction. blacksmith aims to provide a solution for developers to write clean client code and for ops to monitor api calls also on the client side.

What is Blacksmith

Blacksmith is a declarative tool for consuming REST Api.

In a REST API, resources are declared under HTTP routes, and every http verb has its own definition.

In Blacksmith, every resources are bound to schemas that define request and response, in order to abstract HTTP.

This is a common concept for SQL table with ORM, where tables are bound to models, and then, operations are available on models. This is a usefull abstraction to write maintainable code and to dive into a project easilly.

Handling API resources using an http client, such as requests_ does not handle that abstraction, and does not handle bindings to objects, and can be compared to a raw connection because it is just a transport.

This is the problem blacksmith is trying to solve, having a nice abstraction of services that use REST in a microservices architecture.

.. note::

| Blacksmith is not an HTTP Client or a model validator. | Blacksmith use httpx_ to perform http query, and use Pydantic_ to validate models.

.. _requests: https://docs.python-requests.org/ .. _httpx: https://www.python-httpx.org/ .. _Pydantic: https://pydantic-docs.helpmanual.io/

Why not using a SDK to consume APIs ?

SDK are about importing an external library in a service. And a service is consumed by many services for different purpose. As a result, SDK create coupling between service, and this is something that should be avoid.

An SDK for a service will declare all the resources, routes, and attribute of resources when a service consumer may consume just a few.

SDK may hide what is really used by every service.

To avoid this, every consumers of API, should declare its own consumers contracts to get a better view of which service use what.

.. note::

TLDR; SDK are fine in public API, by the way, but not in a microservices architecture.

Building SDK

By the way, blacksmith can be use to build a SDK for public API.

Working with or without asyncio

Blacksmith is written for asyncio, but works with synchronous API without overhead. The synchronous API is generated using unasync_ and tested.

.. note::

All class started by Async are asynchronous, and all class started by Sync are synchronous, for an explicit usage

.. _unasync: https://unasync.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Read More

You can read the full documentation of this library here_.

.. _full documentation of this library here: https://mardiros.github.io/blacksmith/user/introduction.html

.. important::

| The documentation has been moved to github pages. | The documentation under readthedocs is obsolete.