COmanage Developers List

[Scotty Logan <>]

On Dec 17, 2008, at 6:50 AM, Tom Barton wrote:
> First, grouper web services expose RESTful interfaces as well as  
> SOAP-based ones.

Well, the RestLite services are almost REST, but not really.  The non- 
Lite Rest services are really XML-RPC.  Many of the basics are wrong,  
including:

o they use POST for searching (kinda like using UPDATE instead of  
SELECT in SQL)
o when the Accepts header is not used, the mime-type gets specified in  
the middle of the URL, rather than at the end
o POST is used to create new entities rather than PUT, even though the  
entities' names are known
o the output contains junk data (extra result codes, response times,  
etc.) along with the representation of the requested entity
o few, if any, of the returned representations contain links to other  
entities - e.g. a group representation should contain links to  
representations of its members

As RL Bob and I pointed out a year ago on the grouper list, UW already  
has a good design for a RESTful groups API:

        
https://wiki.cac.washington.edu/display/groups/UW+Groups+Web+Service+Design+Workshop

There's also some work being done on RESTful JSON, to standardize how  
links are represented in JSON.

> Second, if you do go for a CLI-based approach, I'm curious what gsh  
> lacks that would motivate you to write another CLI to grouper. Could  
> you guys report out about that?

What we wrote wasn't another CLI, it was a tool that could be used  
from a CLI, that returns Unix error codes (0 on success, 1 on  
failure), and with easily parsed output.

> Longer term (and maybe even short term), I'd think grouper's REST  
> interfaces are the way to go. Your feedback about any gap between  
> what they offer and what you need would be very valuable for the  
> project.

The tool uses the SOAP interface... the non-RESTful REST interface was  
too distracting.

  Scotty