Timo Stollenwerk: REST API

published Oct 19, 2016

Talk by Timo Stollenwerk at the Plone Conference 2016 in Boston.

I really like Python. I always miss its elegancy when I write Javascript. But Javascript is a reality. It runs on all browsers. If you are a web developer, you need to know Javascript and its frameworks. Things are moving fast.

Plone development happens slow in comparison. Also we have Plone 5, but some universities are still at Plone 3. [My site is Plone 2.5, Maurits.]

plone.restapi is our bridge between Plone and the Javascript framework world. It is not opinionated: you can use Angular or React or tomorrow's framework.

You can login using the REST api and get a token back that you can use in subsequent requests. You can create/get/edit/delete content information, navigation, breadcrumbs, get or set registry settings, handle users. A unified search api will be tricky: making it usable for both default catalog, solr and elasticsearch is basically impossible.

plone.rest is stable. plone.restapi is still in the alpha phase, but a lot of companies are already using it. We are really open to contributions.

Questions? Doesn't the front-end need access to some configuration information that we currently consider private? Yes, that is a problem we run into and are thinking about.