Migrating debbugs' SOAP interface to JSON
Dear debbugs Developers,
I'm Bastian the developer of python-debianbts, the library that is used
by reportbug to query the BTS.
First of all, I'm really happy that we have an API that allows to query
the BTS, and the current interface is *a lot* better than the HTML
parsing that we did 10 years ago. However, while SOAP was state of the
art a while ago, it has it's limitations. The most severe one for us:
it's getting harder and harder to find libraries that parse SOAP
properly in Python and trying to parse SOAP replies "by hand" seems
daunting.
Also there are a lot of bugs related to parsing the SOAP replies from
the BTS and it is not always clear if the problem is the BTS or the
library that tries to parse the SOAP reply. My feeling having worked
with SOAP, it is unpleasant and messy.
Since our API is already nicely structured, I wonder if we couldn't
switch on the long run to something like JSON? JSON can be easily
created and parsed in many languages and makes debugging a lot easier.
Unfortunately I don't speak Perl, so I can't really help you with the
server side implementation, but I'd be willing to help as much as
possible testing anything that helps to get away from SOAP.
If there's a general willingness to move that direction, I propose an
incremental approach where we create a second API with JSON replies for
each endpoint, one by one and I implement the corresponding parser for
each new endpoint. We could run both APIs in parallel for a while and
turn of the old one once we're sufficiently confident that reportbug
works properly.
What do you think?
Cheers,
Bastian
--
Dr. Bastian Venthur http://venthur.de
Debian Developer venthur at debian org
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