REST + microformats as a Bugzilla API

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On Wed, 2006-10-11 at 16:27 -0700, Myk Melez wrote:
> The enduring popularity of REST, coupled with the growing popularity of 
> microformats, suggests to me that the most developer-, user-, and web- 
> friendly way for us to build an API for Bugzilla is to integrate it with 
> the app's existing user-focused mechanisms for requesting and retrieving 
> information.
> 
> In other words, use REST for RPC, and return data-only responses when 
> appropriate, but structure our HTML responses with embedded metadata (à 
> la microformats) so clients can cleanly extract data from them.
> 
> Thoughts?

	I like having our XML-RPC API separate, because it's a lot easier to
keep it stable.

	We already have some semi-REST mechanisms, like the XML representation
of a bug.

	I like XML-RPC because it's easier to interact with it programmatically
from somewhere else--XML-RPC is a standard, so there are modules in all
languages to parse it.

	If we just have our own REST system, clients have to know exactly how
our particular system works. We also lose the functionality that our
XML-RPC server modules give us on the side of creating well-crafted
responses.

	Perhaps we could implement a sort of REST URL interface to our XML-RPC
API, which might make life easier for JavaScript developers and other
people who don't have an easily-accessible XML-RPC client package.

	-Max
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