Top-down workflow

Hi, everyone.

I'm a MSc student at University of Brasilia and a employee at Brazilian
Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management.

I joined this list recently. I'm experimenting with JSON-LD and Hydra to
support a API redesign which I'm involved. I know that the preferred way to
integrate Hydra with web services is to use tools like HydraBundle or
hydra-java, but this is somewhat a bottom-up workflow, and, I think, not
suitable for all use cases.

So, I reasoned if a top-down workflow, which starts with a API
specification document, written using JSON-LD and the Hydra vocabulary has
value. The advantages that I can see are: design an API without needing a
implementation, to involve non-developers in the process of design,
implement the same API in diverse programming languages.

Accordingly, a tool set must exist to aid with this workflow. First, we
could have a code generator tool to convert the API specification into the
desired programming language. Also, we could have a tool to aid in writing
the API itself.

In that sense, I developed a simple prototype used as a proof of concept of
the code generator. It is very crude, and works only for Java as target.
But it can be used to experiment with these ideas. The source-code is
available at https://github.com/mcesarhm/hydra2java.

I would be very grateful in getting feedback of yours about this idea, and
about the prototype.

Thanks in advance,

M.César