New REST API - motivation

[Mark Côté]

Hi Alan.  Good question.  There are a few reasons for a REST API.  Here
are a few:

* It's the de facto standard for web interfaces these days.  Every web
developer knows how to use HTTP APIs, and it's very simple to use in
modern browsers and JavaScript frameworks.

* Similarly, REST uses JSON, which is now much more popular than XML for
new projects, mainly because of its readability and size.

* REST is a lot more convenient to use on the command line.  Simple
tools like curl can easily access REST APIs; there are no common
command-line tools for accessing XML-RPC (as far as I know).

Technically our REST API isn't very RESTish; it doesn't closely follow
the standard REST model.  We're working on improving that in a new REST
version for a future Bugzilla release.

Note that we'll be deprecating XML-RPC and JSON-RPC soon so that we can
concentrate on building a great REST API without being encumbered by
technologies that are falling out of use.

Mark



On 2014-12-05 1:26 PM, Alan Evangelista wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> My team maintains a customized Bugzilla version for IBM internal use.
> 
> I'm curious to know why you guys are developing a REST API for Bugzilla
> 5.0.
> The current XML-RPC interface has known downsides? I know that RESTful
> interfaces
> using vanilla HTTP have some advantages, such as caching and versioning
> out of
> the box, but I wonder if there are additional motivations.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Alan Evangelista
> 
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-- 
Mark Côté
Assistant Project Lead, Bugzilla
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