Orbital – Dynamically unifying APIs and data with no glue code
Hey HN, I'm excited to share Orbital, a new approach for unifying APIs and Data sources! Rather than relying on glue code to bridge endpoints, Orbital leverages annotations in schemas & API specs to build the integration dynamically. The traditional method of crafting glue code often becomes repetitive and burdensome to maintain in the long run. With Orbital, developers embed tags to their existing API specs (OAP, Protobuf, etc), indicating where data can be sourced, and publish these specs to Orbital (which runs self-hosted). Consumers query these tags with our TaxiQL language, and Orbital…
In plain words
Orbital unifies multiple APIs and data sources by using annotations in existing API specifications rather than custom integration code. Developers tag their API specs (OpenAPI, Protobuf, etc.) to indicate data sources, then publish them to Orbital, which runs self-hosted. Consumers query these tags using TaxiQL language, and Orbital dynamically generates integrations—merging APIs, combining API and database queries, or enriching event streams—without requiring resolvers or glue code maintenance.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey HN, I'm excited to share Orbital, a new approach for unifying APIs and Data sources! Rather than relying on glue code to bridge endpoints, Orbital leverages annotations in schemas & API specs to build the integration dynamically. The traditional method of crafting glue code often becomes repetitive and burdensome to maintain in the long run. With Orbital, developers embed tags to their existing API specs (OAP, Protobuf, etc), indicating where data can be sourced, and publish these specs to Orbital (which runs self-hosted). Consumers query these tags with our TaxiQL language, and Orbital generates the integration on the fly. That could be merging multiple APIs, blending API and database queries, or enriching event streams to craft custom message payloads. It feels a lot like writing GraphQL, but there's no resolvers to maintain, and producers are free to use a variety of API Spec languages. The beauty of using tags over field names is the adaptability. As API developers update and publish their specs, the integration remains seamless and automatically adjusts. Under the hood, the tags (and associated query language) are actually Taxi - an OSS meta-language and toolchain we build (and have shared previously). Orbital is a query engine that executes TaxiQL queries, generating the integration. We've been working on this for a while, and have a number of production deployments. We recently made the move to make the source available on Github under a mix of Apache 2 (Open Core) and BuSL. In a nutshell, Orbital excels in Data Composition (covering APIs, DBs), crafting Bespoke Event Streams, and streamlining ELT workloads into databases. Excited to hear your thoughts and feedback!
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