[antlr-interest] Grammars for API description

[Ben Senior]

Hi, sorry if this is too vague for the list... but I had an odd dream 
last night about using grammars to enforce API structure...

I remember there was an effort years ago when component based 
development hype was at its peak that one way to define components was 
in the way they interact with one another (which fell down because in 
describing that in detail, you're essentially implementing the 
internals)... but nevertheless... clients don't really "command/ask" 
servers simple questions... api calls follow patterns, individual calls 
make up sentences.

Just taking it from a security angle, given a particular authenticated 
role, wouldn't a grammar based description of how which api's can be 
called be a major improvement over the current situation (and quite a 
useful abstraction)?  The key of course is in the stateful/contextual 
nature of the state machine which would parse the api requests as tokens 
and validate whether the interaction patterns are valid.

Has anybody heard of anybody doing something like this? Was it a success?

Thanks,

Ben