[Openledger-developer] API Design Idea

[Tony F. <to...@sy...>]

I have been thinking quite a bit about how to implement an API for 3rd
party/custom apps to use SL. The solution I have come up with is not
exactly what has been talked about on this list in the past, but I think
it could work quite well. It won't help future SL development at all
though.

What I'm thinking is that the API could sit on top of the GUI. In the
past we've talked about something that could be used to re-implement the
GUI but I really think that anything we do to that layer of SL would be
best started as a re-write/re-implementation of SL that is DB schema
compatible.

In the meantime I think the immediate thing to do is to create an API
that interacts with SL through a combination of LWP::UserAgent and
HTML::Form. We could make the API SL specific or we could generalize the
API and make a backend for it that interacts with the current SL.

I have some UML (created with Dia) of a possible generalized API. I
wouldn't mind getting some comments on the API. I'll post the UML on the
SF.net project webspace later today.

So what do you people thing of interacting with SL through HTTP
requests? I think it will be the most straight forward and probably the
most SL-version-non-specific way I can come up with.

-- 
Tony Fraser
to...@sy...
Sybaspace Internet Solutions                        System Administrator
phone: (250) 246-5368                                fax: (250) 246-5398