openstack team mailing list archive

[Jay Pipes <jaypipes@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 1:06 AM, Mellquist, Peter
<peter.mellquist@xxxxxx> wrote:
> The topic of when an API should be defined is also important. Do we define an API / WADL 1) up front before the service is implemented, 2) in parallel with the impl, 3) or after the impl? I am an advocate of #1 or perhaps #2 but not #3 since #3 is just retrofitting an API on existing impl without any real API design considerations.

Wow, +10. We had a rousing discussion about this at the design
summit... I'm in the process of finalizing the proposal for an
OpenStack Images API 2.0 which will be sent to the mailing list
shortly (just got some excellent feedback from Mark Nottingham this
morning on some pieces that I'm going to change, thanks Mark!). We
(the Glance contribs) will ask the community for feedback over a 3-4
week RFC period. At the same time, we'll begin implementing the
proposal in a separate branch of Glance, providing more feedback to
the mailing list if we run into issues where the implementation of the
proposed API is cumbersome or we recommend changes to the proposal. At
the same time, we'll incorporate feedback as we get it on the mailing
list and try working that feedback into the implementation we'll be
working on.

Once the community decides to accept some iterated-over proposed 2.0
API, we'll work with Anne to put the API into
http://github.com/openstack/images-api and teams like the QA team can
get busy writing tests *against the proposed 2.0 API, without worrying
that the API will change three times a day*.

Cheers!
-jay