OpenAPI specification

[sverhoeven]

For eWaterCycle project I want to talk from Python with BMI instances running in other languages and/or containers or other computers.
For the communication I want to use something simple like http as the protocol and json as the serialization format.
I made an OpenAPI specification of the BMI at https://github.com/eWaterCycle/remotebmi/blob/main/openapi.yaml (as docs)

I am working on proof of concepts of

1. a Julia web server which accepts a Julia BMI implementation
2. a R web server which accepts a R BMI class
3. a Python client that on outside has a BMI interface and on inside talks to BMI web service

Some questions:

1. Is there something like this already out there?
2. When you have a client and server the locality of the config_file of the initialize function is ambiguous. I now assume that client and server are on a shared filesystem. Does anyone have any solutions or experiences with this problem?
3. Does someone want to collaborate on this?

PS. In the past we have used gRPC for communication,
but gRPC is not available in Julia or R. And we have models in those languages we want to support.