[Openstreetmap-dev] REST

[Jo Walsh]

On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 02:17:59PM +0100, Tom Carden wrote:
> Both.  Happy because there would be less fluff over the wire (XML-RPC is 
> uglee), and Sad because I don't know of a neat REST library which just 
> bungs things into generic types in Java, and parsing XML the way I do it 
> makes the baby Jesus cry.

Happy, because the inconsistencies in the current xmlrpc API have made
it frustrating for me to work with. In the past i've done a fair bit
with RESTful APIs which return RDF/XML. mudlondon's brain worked this
way, and a few years ago i wrote a dodgy position paper on a generic
approach to this:
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/events/20031113-storage/positions/walsh.html
 
> I've only ever used the Flickr REST API (which now has a complicated but 
> interesting authentication API too).  http://www.flickr.com/services/api 
> Any others we should be aware of?  (Anyone used the google API or the 
> Amazon API?)

it might be worth raising the EVNT API, which i think uses xcal xml,
and also Earle's work on a GETting interface, with bits of POSTing
growing into place, for openguides.org
http://wiki.wirelesslondon.info/RestfulRepresentations
has some links to thinkings about this. geocoder.us also has a
terribly simple one.

i had a lot of "where's the toolkit, what's the interface" type
thoughts before i realised the zen of rest is it's not really there.
re REST libraries, that makes it hard to state anything; the amazon
approach is to provide a little developer pack which abstracts
representations away in modules. count me as +1 to make simple perl
and python widgets if this approach seemed sane.

also count me as +1 to learn ruby and actually contrib code (!) to a
new RESTful interface for osm, whether that's RDFish directly (if it's
not, i'll make an RDF-output gateway service for the GETs which builds
a local model incrementally, as i've done in the past for del.icio.us 
and evnt....


-jo