SOAP

[Jim Walters]

On Tue, 2003-06-17 at 09:01, Myk Melez wrote:

> >Anyway, there are a bunch of things to figure out
> >
> >- Which APIs to implement
> >  
> >
> All of them!  I'd start with authentication and authorization, since 
> you'll need to have that for everything else.  After that the big two 
> are searching for bugs and retrieving a specific bug, closely followed 
> by submitting a bug and updating an existing bug.  It goes on from there.

Thanks. I'll start with those. One question is whether (with cookie
based authentication) to use the cookie system for SOAP:

http://guide.soaplite.com/#security%20(ssl,%20basic/digest%20authentication,%20cookiebased%20authentication,%20ticketbased%20authentication,%20access%20control)

I probably need to force the client to keep and resend the
authentication token with each API once one has been acquired. 

> >- General philosophy on API arguments but more specifically return
> >values (thin, heavy, complex, simple)
> >  
> >
> API arguments should make sense.  I'm not 100% sure what you are asking 
> about return values, but I think the answer is that it varies.  The API 
> should be able to provide all the data available, or at least all the 
> data that the current web interface provides.  In cases where only a 
> subset of data is regularly required, however, it should be able to 
> retrieve and return just that subset.

Here I'm thinking along the lines of whether it is generally better to
use one or two APIs to break up a functions return data. Here is an
example... given an API to return query results should it be broken up
into two calls (return the ids, and then a second call to return the
record values for a single id) or a single super flexible call to return
the values for a list of ids. Ideally it would reflect the calls in the
Bugzilla library and the SOAP layer would just match the existing APIs. 

> >The nice surprise was the SOAP support in Mozilla. It will give me a
> >chance to play with XUL widgets along the way.
> >  
> >
> Over in Bugxula I'm building a XUL client for Bugzilla:
> 
> http://bugxula.mozdev.org/
> 
> If you'd like to contribute to this project, please do!

Definately.