[ghns] ghns status, api, etc.

[Jeremy Whiting]

On Monday 22 June 2009 07:45:28 Frank Karlitschek wrote:
> Hi Jeremy,
>
> you are right. I think the current situation is not good. We should
> have one API standard for collaboration not three.
>
> Josef, Jeremy, are you at GCDS? Perhaps we can discuss a few ideas in
> person.

Unfortunately, I wont be there this year either... =( but I can put together a 
few problems/questions I've hit in the client side if the two of you could get 
together and discuss things that would be great (assuming josef attends).  I 
do have more time to spend on this lately and probably will for a while now, 
so it's a good time I think.

> I for one plan to support and push the open collaboration services API
> in the future. I´m in contact with people from other free software
> project who plan to support it also.
> I think it has the biggest potential to become a cross desktop and
> cross platform standard.
>
> But I am biased of course because I created it. :-)
>
> Perhaps we could use and extend the existing provider files to store
> information which provider support which API.
>
> What do you think?

yes, I think that's exactly what I'm thinking too.  At a minimum the 
providers.xml could state which api each provider is using. Alternatively it 
could specify which features it supports and how (voting="rest" 
votingurl="http://something.php?$ID,$value" or somesuch.) A big part of this 
wrt Josef's api is that each downloadable object needs to have an id that the 
client can give to the server for voting/downloading/getting comments, etc. 
that your api frank already has I believe. I would also like to use that id to 
query the server if there are updates available for installed entries.

Anyway, I'm not even sure if josef is still on this list, so I'll cc this to 
him also just in case.  If you two are able to meet I'll be more than happy to 
make myself available via skype/irc/whatever if you like also.

thanks,
Jeremy

>
> Best Regards
> Frank
>
> On 19.06.2009, at 17:38, Jeremy Whiting wrote:
> > Hey all, especially Frank and Josef,
> >
> > I'm wondering about the state of ghns as it is now.  The KNewStuff2
> > client
> > library has been dormant for a long time (mostly because of my lack
> > of time
> > probably) but I believe I could easily get it up-to-date with
> > respect to ghns
> > functionality (viewing comments, reading comments, searching,
> > voting, even
> > uploading, etc.) if we can clearly define a common api for
> > interacting with web
> > services. (Or even discovering the functionality of different api's
> > automatically maybe?)
> >
> > One example is voting, in Frank's opendesktop REST api there's one
> > method to
> > vote for items, by passing an id, and a vote, and authenticating.
> > In hotstuff
> > there's a different api using soap and dxs to do the same thing.
> > This is
> > troublesome to the client because it basically has to know and
> > understand both
> > protocols/api's to work with both.  I'm wondering if we could have
> > on each web
> > service an xml file or something that clearly defines the api and
> > protocols
> > used.  This would make it fairly simple for the client to support both
> > protocols/api's.  This could also make it fairly simple for sites
> > that provide
> > only artwork/other data via rss feeds to provide an xml file
> > explaining it's
> > rss feed format so KNewStuff2 could use them as providers also.
> >
> > Just wanting to get the ball rolling on some collaboration/consensus
> > to get
> > things working better and get missing functionality implemented.
> >
> > Jeremy
> > _______________________________________________
> > ghns mailing list
> > ghns at lists.freedesktop.org
> > http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/ghns
>
> --
> Frank Karlitschek
> karlitschek at kde.org