launchpad-users team mailing list archive

[Tom Berger <tom.berger@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

2009/1/28 Karl Fogel <karl.fogel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> "Michael B. Trausch" <mike@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>> On Tue, 27 Jan 2009 18:13:22 -0500
>> Karl Fogel <karl.fogel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>> As you might imagine, this has been discussed (a lot) by the Launchpad
>>> developers.  I suspect the reason it hasn't happened yet is just the
>>> design complications -- how to offer semi-arbitrary web-editing while
>>> at the same time preserving a consistent look-and-feel in Launchpad,
>>> and making sure that Launchpad's features stay accessible from each
>>> project. This doesn't mean it's impossible, just hard.
>>
>> I'd think that people would rather not like that.  The idea behind
>> webspace would be to have completely arbitrary sites.
>
> Thanks, that's useful to know.
>
> I should emphasize the "I suspect" in my mail: I was speculating, not
> stating feature goals.  It may well be that when this gets done, it does
> indeed allow totally arbitrary pages.  I just don't know.
>
>> LP could even expose some sort of API that could be used to quickly and
>> easily embed information about the Launchpad project on the site,
>> though I think it'd be too much to require that it be used.
>
> Now, I *am* pretty confident in stating that there would be APIs :-).
> In fact, there already are: https://help.launchpad.net/API/ (those are
> Python APIs, but I have to believe that if we offer arbitrary web pages,
> we're going to offer a way to embed Launchpad functionality in them --
> that's the whole point, after all).

Just a minor correction: the APIs aren't just for Python, they are
general purpose REST resources which can be used from any language or
environment. We provide launchpadlib, a higher-level Python library
that makes working with these APIs very simple, but people can and do
use them from other languages too. Launchpad itself, for example, uses
this API from Javascript to allow some dynamic controls to communicate
with the server. We will do everything we can to try and help folks
who want to use the API using other languages.

As for website hosting, and this is, to be clear, my own very personal
opinion - I really look forward to having a structured way to record
free-form information on Launchpad (a wiki, basically), but I'm not
convinced that general hosting is very important. There are so many
free (or very cheap) hosting solutions out there which projects can
use, but almost no-one is working on providing the integration between
applications and between projects that Launchpad provides.

Tom