Just trying not so confuse realistic testing with self-deception :) Not convinced testing with synthetic data can pretend to be similar to a production environment.

It is not realistic to replicate a production setup in development when you’re working with sensitive user data. I’ve worked in different contexts (law enforcement, healthcare, financial services) where we’ve had complicated setups (in one instance including a thing called pre-staging environment), but never would a sizeable team of developers have access to user data, and thus to a realistic setup in terms of size, let alone of quality of data.

I’m sorry, but doesn’t sound very convincing. The strongest (reiterated) argument is “venv is standard”, but so is docker.

To me it depends on the base image. Some don’t have curl, but have wget. I would go with the flow instead of installing it myself. Especially if I can get away with not having to add more layers for an image of my own and/or using the same command for all containers

Ok, that was stupid. Doing healthcheck with wget, does what wget does: it downloads the result. I had to add --spider to stop doing that

  wget -nv --spider http://localhost:8000 || exit 1

Well, I do need OpenAPI (Swagger). What I don’t need is the generation of thousands of equal static files. Out of all these generated files, index.html would’ve been enough and I don’t need index.html.1, etc.

https://github.com/pgp/XFiles is what I’ve been using and am pretty happy about it

In both XML and JSON you have lists and embedding hierarchichies (I use this term to abstract away from dictionaries/maps which are not exactly represented in XML). These allow for browsing/iterating and filtering when after a particular node.

One difference is that nodes in XML are named (tags). Another thing that you have in XML and not in JSON is attributes. A good example of their use is querying by tag name, node id or class attributes in HTML (which is a loose example of XML). To do the equivalent in JSON, you need to work with keys and values which are less structured and (arguably as consequence) often missing such meta-data. HTML is a popular example, but pretty much any XML has ids and other meta tags and attributes. JSON standards typically don’t and it’s a long separate topic whether this is due to the characteristics of the format itself.

PS: another big difference is that XML also allows for comments, which allows to also encode intent, not only content.

Actually XPATH is arguably more flexible than JSON. There’s also jsonpath, but I don’t think I’ve seen it meaningfully used