> On Fri, 29 Mar 2019, Scharf, Michael wrote: > > > As mentioned on the mic: There are quite a number of solutions to > "rigorously" specify APIs. Some of these general-purpose techniques are > IMHO also used for configuration/provisioning tasks in the networking > industry, i.e., as alternative to YANG. > > > > In a former life, I had quite some discussions on the role of YANG as > compared to, for instance: > > > > * swagger.io (https://swagger.io/) > > > > * gRPC, gNMI and protocol buffers (see e.g. draft-openconfig-rtgwg-gnmi- > spec-01 in the IETF) > > I thought gRPC and gNMI was equivalent to netconf, not to YANG?
Yep, but I have mentioned protocol buffers, too. And I haven't mentioned other solutions in that space, such as Apache Thrift. By no means my list was meant to be comprehensive. BTW, I won't argue that other solutions indeed solve exactly the same problem like NETCONF/YANG - in fact, they do not. > > In both cases there is are tooling eco-system that are IMHO widely used > > by app developers (and often preferred over YANG). The YANG tooling > that > > exists in industry, e.g., for code auto-generation, is quite specific to > > network management, as far as I can tell. > > > > To me, whether to develop models in YANG or in other data modeling > > languages depends a lot on the use case and the target software > > developer community. Of course, in the RTG and OPS area YANG is the > > default data modeling language. > > My experience is that people typically will take whatever there is lots of > tooling for and it's "easy to use". Then as they use it more and more > extensively, they discover all limitations and demand the tool is > extended/enhanced. People will say "oh, JSON is so easy to work with" and > after a while they discover that data models is good for > defining/validating what goes on the wire, and now all of a sudden after a > while you've invented all the "complication" of YANG. > > Personally it's not super important to me that NETCONF is used, but I do > think using a good data modeling language is important, thus I think YANG > modeling is important. If one is not using NETCONF, YANG may not be the only data modeling language one could use. Having said this, YANG is clearly an *excellent* data modeling language, and probably the only relevant one in some areas of industry (e.g. on routers). Personally, I am perfectly fine with using YANG. Michael > The same way a huge amount of work has gone into XML, a huge amount of > work has gone into YANG, to make sure it's well defined and works from > lots of aspects. > > -- > Mikael Abrahamsson email: [email protected] _______________________________________________ Taps mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/taps
