[Ocs] [rant] comments on open-collaboration-services

[Frank Karlitschek]

Hi Thomas,

thanks for the feedback.

Most of your critics are addressed in the upcoming version 2.0 of the OCS spec.
I know that I´m behind schedule here. I´m very sorry.

We will use as many existing specification as possible of course. Please note that OCS is older than OpenSocial for example.



Best Regards
Frank




On 21.12.2011, at 11:25, Thomas Koch wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm writing my bachelor thesis on REST and person/contact information[1]. By 
> incident (via Enrico Zini's Talk on Debconf11 about app installers) I found 
> open collaboration services, which also contains person informations and the 
> common wrong claim to be restful.
> 
> Since I care about free software I dare to give a few comments from my first 
> impression. I'm sorry if I should get anything wrong.
> 
> a) OCS is not restful for several reasons[2], e.g.:
>  - predefined URIs (templates) instead of discoverability
>  - no reuse of existing media types (see below)
>  - meta data in the body instead of in the header
>  - GET/POST/PUT and DELETE are already specified in REST (HTTP). Respecifying 
> them means either that they're misused or that the specification is redundant.
>  - "URL arguments" are a very good indicator of a non restful RPC-over-HTTP 
> like API. An URI is an identifier, not a place to put procedural parameters. 
> The method is GET and it has one required parameter: the URI. Several other 
> optional parameters are specified in the HTTP request header.
> 
> b) Use descriptive tokens instead of (or additional to) numbers (type, status, 
> ...). The extra bytes are well invested to ease development and 
> "debuggability".
> 
> c) Reuse existing HTTP status codes and don't blow your specification by 
> reiterating things that are already specified elsewhere.
> 
> d) Reuse existing standards and media types. Candidates could be:
> vCard/xCard, Activitystreams, ATOM especially ATOM categories, iCal Events, 
> oAuth2, oStatus
> 
> e) It's especially sad, that there was another attempt to represent person 
> data inside freedesktop which also didn't look for existing standards:
> http://groups.google.com/group/desktop-
> couchdb/browse_thread/thread/4dbac2e9d03aaa5d
> 
> There may be other standards that I'm not aware of for example to declare 
> dependencies between software, maybe here?
> http://open-services.net/
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Description_of_a_Project
> 
> OpenSocial is similar in some regards but also a non restful standard and 
> shouldn't be taken as a model. But at least it is supported by major companies 
> and still has an open process. It is an example that even Yahoo, Google, IBM 
> and others can produce bad standards.
> 
> [1] https://github.com/thkoch2001/bachelor-thesis
> [2] http://kellabyte.com/2011/09/04/clarifying-rest/
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro
> _______________________________________________
> Ocs mailing list
> Ocs at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/ocs

Frank Karlitschek
karlitschek at kde.org