The future of JSON API client in Rust

[frol]

I want to start this discussion to collect thoughts about the JSON API client implementation in Rust.

Currently, we have the implementation that lives right in the nearcore repo: https://github.com/near/nearcore/tree/master/chain/jsonrpc/client. It serves the purpose of being used in the tests, and we even manage to use it in near-cli-rs, but it transitively pulls a huge deal of nearcore (e.g. RocksDB), and generally too tightly coupled with nearcore internals.

I recently stumbled upon this article, which might be useful to consider when we plan to design the client library: https://plume.benboeckel.net/~/JustAnotherBlog/designing-rust-bindings-for-rest-ap-is

Also, I want to mention that we considered implementing OpenRPC server to provide the API spec, auto-generated API documentation, and auto-generated API clients in different languages.