Avro as an alternative to Json Schema

[Gregory McFall]

At Pearson Education, where I work, we have  a keen interest in using Avro schemas to describe our data models as an alternative to JSON Schema.  The benefits of Avro are well-documented. (See, for example,  Jon Zuanich's blog.)  Moreover, we have concerns about a gap in the support for JSON Schema.  Francis Galiegue announced that he is no longer able to maintain the  json-schema-validator project.  There are outstanding defects in the validator that are creating problems for us, and no one is stepping up to fix them.

Ideally, we would like to use Avro schemas directly within our Swagger specifications instead of JSON schema, and we would be willing to contribute some developer resources to help make this happen.  Are others interested in seeing direct support for Avro within Swagger?

[Ron Ratovsky]

Hi Gregory,

Thanks for reaching out.

Data modeling is a difficult problem, and there's no perfect solution. Just like you find Avro to be more convenient, there are others who'd find JSON Schema to be more (even with the documented benefits as you shared). Everyone would have their own reasons and whatnot. Losing maintenance of one library in one language is not reason enough to drop/replace support for JSON Schema.

More so, the usage of JSON Schema (or rather an extended subset of it) is defined by the spec and can't just be taken out and replaced with something else. Just like we don't change anything else in the structure of it without releasing a new version of the spec itself (which is definitely not a daily process).

That said, I too have concerns about JSON Schema as a modeling language and believe we should explore other options for the future. This is my personal opinion and does not represent the intention of the 'Swagger team'. I'm not familiar with Avro but there's another solution that was presented to me some time ago that seems interesting. The proper way to discuss it for now would be to open an issue on swagger-spec and we'll take it from there. I believe it is worth a discussion, whether we make a change in the future or not, at least to raise awareness to the possible issues.

There may be a way to use Avro schema alternatively even now using vendor extensions, but that would require some heavy hacking in the available tool set. If you'd like to explore that option, we can do that as well.

On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 3:10 PM, Gregory McFall <gregory...@pearson.com> wrote:

At Pearson Education, where I work, we have  a keen interest in using Avro schemas to describe our data models as an alternative to JSON Schema.  The benefits of Avro are well-documented. (See, for example,  Jon Zuanich's blog.)  Moreover, we have concerns about a gap in the support for JSON Schema.  Francis Galiegue announced that he is no longer able to maintain the  json-schema-validator project.  There are outstanding defects in the validator that are creating problems for us, and no one is stepping up to fix them.

Ideally, we would like to use Avro schemas directly within our Swagger specifications instead of JSON schema, and we would be willing to contribute some developer resources to help make this happen.  Are others interested in seeing direct support for Avro within Swagger?

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[Gregory McFall]

Rob,

Thanks for the quick reply to my post.  

Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that Swagger drop support for JSON Schema.   I am suggesting that Swagger add support for Avro.  It would be nice if adopters of Swagger could choose the schema definition language to use and not be limited by a subset of JSON Schema.  I understand that such a change would require a new version of the Swagger specification, and these things take time.

I have taken your suggestion and opened a new issue against swagger-spec.  Please see Issue #466.

~ Greg

On Monday, September 21, 2015 at 8:20:47 AM UTC-4, Ron wrote:

Hi Gregory,

Thanks for reaching out.

Data modeling is a difficult problem, and there's no perfect solution. Just like you find Avro to be more convenient, there are others who'd find JSON Schema to be more (even with the documented benefits as you shared). Everyone would have their own reasons and whatnot. Losing maintenance of one library in one language is not reason enough to drop/replace support for JSON Schema.

More so, the usage of JSON Schema (or rather an extended subset of it) is defined by the spec and can't just be taken out and replaced with something else. Just like we don't change anything else in the structure of it without releasing a new version of the spec itself (which is definitely not a daily process).

That said, I too have concerns about JSON Schema as a modeling language and believe we should explore other options for the future. This is my personal opinion and does not represent the intention of the 'Swagger team'. I'm not familiar with Avro but there's another solution that was presented to me some time ago that seems interesting. The proper way to discuss it for now would be to open an issue on swagger-spec and we'll take it from there. I believe it is worth a discussion, whether we make a change in the future or not, at least to raise awareness to the possible issues.

There may be a way to use Avro schema alternatively even now using vendor extensions, but that would require some heavy hacking in the available tool set. If you'd like to explore that option, we can do that as well.

On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 3:10 PM, Gregory McFall <gregory...@pearson.com> wrote:

At Pearson Education, where I work, we have  a keen interest in using Avro schemas to describe our data models as an alternative to JSON Schema.  The benefits of Avro are well-documented. (See, for example,  Jon Zuanich's blog.)  Moreover, we have concerns about a gap in the support for JSON Schema.  Francis Galiegue announced that he is no longer able to maintain the  json-schema-validator project.  There are outstanding defects in the validator that are creating problems for us, and no one is stepping up to fix them.

Ideally, we would like to use Avro schemas directly within our Swagger specifications instead of JSON schema, and we would be willing to contribute some developer resources to help make this happen.  Are others interested in seeing direct support for Avro within Swagger?

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[Ron Ratovsky]

What is it about my name that makes people misread it? You're not the first ;)

Thanks for opening the issue. Supporting multiple schema types has its own issues, but we'll tackle those over the issue you opened.

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