launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Julian Edwards <julian.edwards@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 24 November 2010 11:50:45 Jonathan Lange wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 11:07 PM, Gary Poster <gary.poster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
wrote:
> > On Nov 22, 2010, at 10:48 AM, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> ...
> 
> >> (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.
> 
> I don't get the scepticism. They are still part of some over-arching
> operation, and that operation can be exposed as a remotely-accessible
> API.

The problem is that you need to export a new method on the API for anything 
you want to be done in an atomic transaction.  That's going to bloat things 
significantly and add to development overhead.  And unless you can ever get 
the webservice overhead *tiny*, it's also a massive performance impact.