launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Robert Collins <robert.collins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

FWIW I think that refactoring to make the internal API match an ideal
web services API is good in principle. However we may need to change
our coding style substantially to end up with an ideal web services
API - if you examine the EC2 API, which is nice to work with, to do
fast operations on multiple objects is ingrained - its not ingrained
for our local API.

And there is the issue I think: what makes a great web services API is
fundamentally different to what makes a great in-app-server API. The
latency and bandwidth constraints are radically different.

For instance, in a web services API consumer, you want the server to
do as much filtering as possible, but then return *all* the relevant
data at once. Round trips are terrible. (350ms from here).

In a in-app-server API you probably want an object model, with methods
on self, rather than collections that mutate a set of objects.

-Rob