darael: Black lines on a white background.  A circle, with twenty-one straight lines connecting seven equally spaced points. (Default)
Darael ([personal profile] darael) wrote in [site community profile] dw_dev2014-04-20 01:53 am
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On clients and APIs

Dreamwidth's APIs are poorly documented (people basically have to work off docs for old versions of LJ's APIs). They're also missing key features, like comment handling for more than backups.

I've been told there have been "some internal conversations about deprecating the XML-RPC API -- keeping it for backwards compatability, but moving to a much more modern second-gen API", but that nobody has had both the time and the inclination to work on designing such a thing.

Well, this is me, volunteering. To that end, I'm looking for input on what exactly such a new API needs to provide, and whether there's a preferred underlying technology to build on (exempli gratia, stick with XML-RPC? Change to SOAP? Use JSON? RESTful or not? et cetera). What I'm getting at here is that I'm entirely happy to take point, as it were, and to make decisions (especially where there's little or no consensus and someone has to make the call), draw up specs, write docs, and so forth, but the result is highly unlikely to be a really useful API unless I get input from more sources than my own experience and looks at the code.

At this stage, therefore, I want everything you, the reader, have to say on the subject. Use cases especially.

Go.

[personal profile] jewelfox 2014-04-20 07:18 am (UTC)(link)
I tried to find out how to make a DW app for Windows Phone, only to find that I'd have to use those pretty much undocumented APIs in order to so much as read my friends' posts. Apparently LJ had "authenticated RSS" or something, but DW doesn't.

As someone who still wants to make that Dreamwidth app, I am 100 percent in favour of this and would be happy to give you feedback as needed.