PLOG Thursday RESTapi current status

RESTapi current status

Timo started with some proof of concept implementations. See https://github.com/plone/plone.restapi

If it would not work with for example the ZPublisher, then that would be bad, so we should look into that. Let it support http verbs, like POST, GET, PUT, DELETE, instead of assuming it is a webdav request when it is not POST or GET.

Aren't people moving away from that, just using GET parameters? Staying close to REST seems best, Angular and other frameworks can handle it. Workflow actions will use POST anyway.

You will always transform stuff between the saved data and presented data, like saving a uuid and presenting a normal url. You save something and then may get back an object with different values.

Several levels of RESTfulness.

1. Resources
2. RPC calls
3. HTTP verbs
4. hypermedia

If we only go for the second level, we could just use the json api. We should play around with the third level, to see if we can make it work.

There is a risk that we break webdav when we fix the ZPublisher. We may have to do that. Webdav works according to some, is buggy for others, or not working at all. For webdav you could look at Accept headers, or discover webdav in some way like that.

Take a look at the dexterity transmogrify code and see if we can take some export code from that. Also https://github.com/collective/plone.jsonapi.core. And look at json schema.

We thought about authentication, but the first phase is just about reading. In a web browser the current authentication will work fine. For non browser visits we need something else, but that can be done later.

The edit schema may differ from the add schema or the view schema. David Glick has written code in javascript for creating a form based on such a schema, using ReactJS and ReactForms.

So we may not need z3c.form then. But z3c.form also does data transformation and validation, you would still need that. If your schema is defined in json, you could use some json schema handling and validation in the backend as well. That is long term.

If you GET a page, you want a json with all the data you might want to see there, so title and fields of this object, list of items if it is a folder, portlets.

Timo: I have limited time to work on this. I do have a project where I am using it. Good if it can work on Plone 4.3 for this. But if it would only work on Plone 5 that would not be a deal breaker.

Hypermedia is there: you can click through the site with json. The json exposes other urls that you could click.

There is a live demo linked on the github page: https://github.com/plone/plone.restapi. You can install a Mozilla json plugin to look at it.

If companies would be willing to give developers money or time for this, that could be helpful. Maybe there is appetite to pool resources. The API design needs to be done before we can ask someone to really dive in and commit. It could feel strange that one person gets paid and others work on it for free, although I wouldn't mind, for me it is a lack of time.