launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Aaron Bentley <aaron@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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On 11/23/2010 06:07 PM, Gary Poster wrote:
> On Nov 22, 2010, at 10:48 AM, Aaron Bentley wrote:

>> 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.

Is this a separate change from Rob's "Group based approach" from the
"Lower query counts via different code structure" thread?

>> (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 share your skepticism, but it seems like there's a renewed push to be
AJAX-y, and if we follow that to the logical extreme, we'll be doing
everything using the web API via Javascript.

>> 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"

No, I don't mean that.  I think you need to write programs, not
"scripts", with real data structures and careful flow of control, to get
stuff done.  You need to understand the API pretty much the same way we
do.  And heck, following our python style guide isn't a terrible idea.
At least, it makes your program more readable to Launchpad developers.

> 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.

So, if we get improved Soyuz documentation for the web API-- the kind
that explains domain models and such, wouldn't that also be useful for
the python API?

Aaron
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