On Wed, 23 Mar 2011, Randy Heydon wrote:
# With Ivanovic's recent updates to the PXML spec, I've made some changes # to the PND repository spec that's being used in milkshake's repo. # Currently, milkshake and I are the only people using this - his site as # a producer, my client as a consumer - but I thought it'd be good to get # some feedback before nailing it down. You can see my proposal on the # wiki: http://pandorawiki.org/PND_repository_specification
gzip is discouraged? why say that? (for most implementations I'd imagine its invisibly handled by webserver and framework)l or is there some reason?
The 'trust' approval thing sounds fishy; ie: how will a client know anything about these people, or how to trust them? or if an account gets decommissioned over time and a new guy with the same name comes along .. sort of begs a whole other REST API to inquire about users by their own unique-id and so on.
I like to fall back to specs being 'minimal' -- that sounds 'site specific', so keep it out of the spec; a site is free to add _Additiona_ values to its own API withou tbreaking any consumer .. maybe that shoudl be codified in the spec -- the assumption that consumers will parse for known values, and not consider unknown key/values an error.
But sometimes I do go too minimal, so I could well be wrong :)
Same question for 'rating'; is that too specific? ie: I could see one site uses 5-star, another using 100% .. they could map to some value system using this spec though, so it sounds doable; but just not sure its appropriate.
I guess the question is .. is this for information culled from pnd,s or site generated? and if both.. shoudl that be two separate feeds.. a pnd repository feed, and a related pnd site specific feed? That might be too loose or krufty, but I think I prefer hybrid .. let sites augment.
But at the same time .. if you have each site augmenting with their own thing .. that can get goofy. In other specs, its common for you to have a minimal core everyone can agree upon, and then domain specific extensions; if at some point the domain specific guyds can agree that yeah, this is really good we should all do it, then the spec goes to v4 and everyone adopts.
But i the need is present at the onset build it in..
So I'd guess..
-- drop the trust stuff -- keep the rating
Sites can always add their own rating system in, or map it to something native. The trust thing sounds really too fragile and specific.. sites might do something very different entirely.
Licenses -- I forget offhand, but does that map to how we have the PXML licenses? ie: license and source are tied there, but not in this proposal;
You may want to define what RESTY operations are available specifically; can an app enquire specifically about an app in the repo by itself to get additional details, etc?
jeff
-- If everyone would put barbecue sauce on their food, there would be no war.