[Openstreetmap-dev] Re: REST

[Tom Carden]

Nick Whitelegg wrote:
> One question: I know little about REST but would it not require clients of
> OSM to write more code than if XML-RPC was used? i.e. the client would have
> to parse the XML themselves rather than let an XML-RPC library do it for
> them? I can see this could be more flexible but for things like login
> tokens it seems more work for the client.
> 

Possibly slightly more in static languages, yes, but things like xpath 
really help.  There's also the benefit of flexibility.  With XML-RPC, I 
think you really have no choice but to parse it all behind the scenes. 
With REST, you can pick out just the bits you want.

Matt's point about being able to build interfaces on the fly with 
languages like Ruby is why it makes more sense for that kind of language.

There's a full implementation of the flickr API in Python (FlickrClient) 
that's only about 50 lines of code (including a test method), and never 
needs updating.  That's what we're buying into here. 
http://www.flickr.com/services/api/

T.