Re: DXS REST Proposal

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

An interesting proposal. I don't think we need to necessarily choose  
one way or the other in relation to SOAP vs. REST. Let's try both and  
see which one is the most successful!

I had planned on adding RSS feeds for a lot of the pages, using the URL  
to provide parameters. For example  
http://art.gnome.org/backgrounds/gnome/rss would list all the  
backgrounds in the GNOME category. This list could then be restricted  
using the same GET string format that the website currently uses (which  
we would obviously have to standardise on). For example:

? 
sort_by=name&thumbnails_per_page=12&view=list&order=DESC&resolution=1280 
x1024

Obviously RSS is not an ideal format to display this information in,  
but it would allow people to subscribe to various customisable  
"channels". Applications might range from a simple "Latest 10 GNOME  
backgrounds", to a background changer script that loads a random  
background from a channel (e.g. from a "Top rated GNOME backgrounds"  
channel).

The advantage to using RSS is that there are already a lot of readers  
out there. However, if we also have feeds using the GHNS/DXS XML  
schema, then custom programs would be able to view a lot more details  
(such as comments, rating and license information).

-Thomas

On 11 Sep 2005, at 4:21 pm, Jon Wood wrote:

> Hello,
>
> After asking about making some UI changes to gnome-art on IRC today, I
> was told you are interested in building a web service to make
> interaction with art.gnome.org, and other desktop theme websites,  
> easier
> to do from client side applications.
>
> I was told that the current proposal is to use SOAP for this, however
> SOAP tends to be have a lot more bloat than neccesary for the
> requirements.
>
> I have written a proposal on using a simpler system based on HTTP
> GET/POST requests, which return the data in a much smaller, more
> readable, format. This makes it a lot easier to debug, and reduces the
> ammount of bandwidth required.
>
> While it will require writing libraries to process the information, I
> believe this will take less time in the long term than using SOAP.
>
> You can find the proposal at http://wiki.jellybob.co.uk/dxs
>
> Jon Wood (Jellybob)
>
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