launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Gary Poster <gary.poster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Nov 22, 2010, at 10:48 AM, Aaron Bentley wrote:

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> On 11/21/2010 08:31 PM, Martin Pool wrote:
>> At the moment you do sometimes need to read the source or think like a
>> developer to understand the API (eg http://pad.lv/486974) but that's
>> not really the goal.  I hope.
> 
> The current strategy is to expose the developer API via the web, and
> AIUI, that's not something we plan to change.  

Actually, a change here is one of the things we're working on proposing, at least for collections.  Entities will probably still be exposed as they are now.

> (In fact, Robert has
> suggested that Launchpad itself should actually use the web API, which
> would make the developer API identical to the web API.)  

I've heard this, and was interested in it.  I'm now pretty skeptical that this is reasonable.  Transactions, for instance, are very useful in a database.  They can be exposed in a webservice, but are not natural for it.

> So I think you
> do need to think like a developer, except perhaps for the most trivial
> scripts.

If "think like a developer" means "you have to read the Launchpad source code" that is certainly the case now. In some cases even that was insufficient when I tried to use some Soyuz APIs.  I hope we can change that.  I would like more uniformity and more documentation, and we're working on both.

Gary