Re: DXS REST Proposal

[Michael Gebhart <lists miketech net>]

Hello,

first thanks to you Jon, helping us with DXS.

The idea of DXS and e.g. GHNS is not to provide a couple of libraries.
The idea is to create a standardized protocol for downloading stuff from
a webpage. So everybody should be able to create a library in the
language he needs.

I don´t have any favourite. SOAP or REST.. well, if we don´t use SOAP,
we should take a look at GHNS again. 

The idea of DXS was not only to download stuff from a webpage. The
Desktop eXchange Services should include a way to exchange current
desktop settings. If a user chooses a new wallpaper the client should
inform the server, so that we have a statistic about currently used
themes, wallpapers and so on. Of course the client only informs the
server if the users enables it :) 

So, if we don´t use SOAP, we maybe should take a look at GHNS and
enhance it with the exchange services. So DXS could be an enhancement of
GHNS.

Surely SOAP is easier to develop on client side, but it depends on the
language. E.g. in ruby parsing XML isn´t very hard too :) We should find
the protocol, which is ideal for our needs. And e.g. ghns is the best
way to do it. I can´t judge it, because we have several ways to do it.
And our needs aren´t really complicated, so a lot of ways is possible. 

Greetings

Mike


> 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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