Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on November 12, 2006 03:26 PM
We are actually building APIs at several levels.
Once we get portions of the database schema stable, sane, normalized, and reworked, there will likely be few if any changes to these parts of the schema for a long time and when we do, we are likely to be working with the community on making sure we have a lot of community feedback in. Having the storage schema be considered a stable API is an important thing, I think.
RIght now, the SL schema is relatively poorly thought out. A lot of things need to be fixed and this is going to require a fairly thorough schema rewrite. After that, I don't foresee a lot of changes that break backward compatibility.
Also a lot of data logic is going into the db. Data logic being the logic needed to store, abstract, and maintian the data. So access to the data itself from outside applications can be made through a standard interface.
So there will be a database-level API.
Another plae we will have an API will be via web services and command line tools. The core dispatcher API will use XML as its primary representation format.
The final place is that we are going to have a light-weight CLI API for interfacing through Cron and other places where light-weight scripting is helpful.
So there will be API's available on many levels. These will be far more stable than the SL API has been in the past, but anyone doing their own custom work would do well to join the devel list so we can work with you to discuss how stable various parts are at the moment and give you fair warning before making changes. All API's can change if there is enough reason to, though we all know stability of the API is a good thing.
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A few more thoughts on API's.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on November 12, 2006 03:26 PMOnce we get portions of the database schema stable, sane, normalized, and reworked, there will likely be few if any changes to these parts of the schema for a long time and when we do, we are likely to be working with the community on making sure we have a lot of community feedback in. Having the storage schema be considered a stable API is an important thing, I think.
RIght now, the SL schema is relatively poorly thought out. A lot of things need to be fixed and this is going to require a fairly thorough schema rewrite. After that, I don't foresee a lot of changes that break backward compatibility.
Also a lot of data logic is going into the db. Data logic being the logic needed to store, abstract, and maintian the data. So access to the data itself from outside applications can be made through a standard interface.
So there will be a database-level API.
Another plae we will have an API will be via web services and command line tools. The core dispatcher API will use XML as its primary representation format.
The final place is that we are going to have a light-weight CLI API for interfacing through Cron and other places where light-weight scripting is helpful.
So there will be API's available on many levels. These will be far more stable than the SL API has been in the past, but anyone doing their own custom work would do well to join the devel list so we can work with you to discuss how stable various parts are at the moment and give you fair warning before making changes. All API's can change if there is enough reason to, though we all know stability of the API is a good thing.
Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
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