[Ovirt-devel] OVirt public API

[David Lutterkort]

On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 08:53 -0400, Hugh O. Brock wrote:
> > Besides being lightweight, a RESTful API is also very attractive because
> > of the support for it in Rails 2 (ActionController::Resources on the
> > server side, and ActiveResource for clients) That support takes away a
> > lot of the headaches around serialization of objects, routing etc.
> 
> I like the REST concept, especially the fact that it will leverage the
> model code we already have in oVirt. However, I would very much like
> to have a command line interface (oVirsh?) to go along with the
> API. Does that seem doable on top of a REST API? XML-RPC I assume is
> covered if we use XML to serialize data.

That's a very important point: a RESTful API does not give you an
XML-RPC API, it's two completly different styles of API. With the
support built into Rails, it's relatively easy to change the way objects
get (de)serialized, but that still doesn't give you XML-RPC.

> This is great, looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I do
> think we will need to have some form of python "bindings" -- surely
> python has some concept of REST?

I think the stickiest point is how hard will it be to deserialize data
into python objects to make using the API easy. There's a
'pyactiveresource'[1] which should give people similar convenience in
accessing the API from Python as from Ruby (see the example[2]), but I
haven't tried it.

David

[1] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyactiveresource/0.2.4
[2] http://superjared.com/projects/pyactiveresource/