[Ovirt-devel] [RFC] Beginnings of a OVirt API

[Hugh O. Brock]

On Wed, Aug 06, 2008 at 09:20:53PM -0400, Perry N. Myers wrote:
> David Lutterkort wrote:
>> Here are a few patches that implement the beginnings of an API for
>> OVirt. They cover handling hosts and storage and hardware pools so
>> far. This patch is mostly meant for discussion, since there's still a few
>> things that need to be tweaked.
>>
>> If you're only interested in seeing how the API is used, jump straight to
>> patch 5/5; it contains all the client side (example) code. To see what gets
>> sent across the wire, you can request stuff like /ovirt/hosts or
>> /ovirt/hardware_pools?path=/default/foo/bar in your browser and admire the
>> XML.
>>
>> In doing this, it became apparent that there are various things in the
>> existing OVirt server code that need to be adapted to better accomodate the
>> API:
>>
>>   * Enable simple HTTP authentication
>>
>>     It should be possible for people to run scripts without hooking the
>>     client into the krb5 infrastructure; instead, scripts should be able to
>>     use simple username/password authentication.
>
> Jay is working on this.  Once this is in the next branch you can modify  
> your stuff to use the user/pass auth.

Also, for what it's worth, curl supports kerberos auth negotiation
(this does not negate the need for basic http authn, but it provides
another option).

>
> [snip]
>>
>>   * Where's the CLI ?
>>
>>     I intended to accompany this with a nice clean CLI client that you can
>>     use for lots of things. Even with the current subset of the API, there
>>     are lots of interesting queries and actions one could perform, even
>>     with the current subset of the API. I'd like to avoid offering a
>>     million options from the CLI though. If anybody has pressing needs for
>>     CLI functionality, let me know, otherwise, I'll start making stuff up.
>
> Start making stuff up for now :)

I agree, we should start with the obvious ones and see where we need
to go from there. This is one of those things that's hard to discover
until you actually try to use it.

hmm... once we have a CLI then we can have a Man Page, how exciting...

--Hugh