[Ovirt-devel] Skipping the Browser :)

[Michael DeHaan]

Hi folks,

The "Breaking the browser thread" has been interesting :)    I 
definitely agree on the importance of using /existing/ monitoring and 
trending tech (which is all the more likely to already be in use at a 
given shop, or be usable by another app on the network) and not focusing 
too much on shiny AJAX bits, and definitely not something that has weak 
OSS support like Flash.   This reminded me of something I wanted to 
bring up -- basically, I wondering about what happens when we don't have 
the (ovirt) browser :)

I'm pretty much a backend guy, and administrators I deal with love 
scripts and command line tools.   More so, one of the things I am 
looking out for is integration with other applications in the future, 
one of them being Spacewalk (http://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk).   So, 
in this case, we'd be hoping to see ovirt more as a web service than a 
GUI application.  This is basically what we are doing with Cobbler -- it 
has it's own GUI, but Spacewalk is probably just going to use it as a 
web service.  

Is everything in ovirt that can be accessed as a GUI (and performed by 
the GUI) accessible as a web service (by this, I mean something simple 
like XMLRPC or JSON-over-REST?).    Can there also be an ovirt command 
line for simple scripting integration?

I can see it being highly useful to saying "find where to put this VM 
and give it storage and make it so (which in turn calls Cobbler API's)" 
though all of this may need to be exposed via other interfaces, scripts, 
and so on.

If there are docs somewhere on how to go about playing with that kind of 
stuff, I'd like to take a look at it.

--Michael