First SOAP, Then REST

By Chris Dent | August 15, 2006, 10:35 pm | 0 Comments

According to Jonas, who is at LinuxWorld with miscellaneous and sundry members of the Socialtext crew, people are asking about our new SOAP service. Meanwhile, back at the lab, we’ve been having some fun with it.

John Thompson, the primary sysadmin, has put together a quick Socialtext filesystem using FUSE and the SOAP server. List, copy and edit pages in a workspace right on the commandline with familiar tools.

I’ve thrown together a very quick search interface that searches multiple workspaces on multiple servers.

Matthew O’Connor made a simple wiki interface to a Socialtext workspace using Ruby on Rails, the SOAP service and a dash of HTML and CSS fu. You can search, edit, see recent changes; do all the basic wiki stuff.

For this week only you can feel free to give the rails client a spin and remember it was built in less than a day.

The SOAP service has provided us with another tool in our box for solving problems and manipulating workspace content.

If you want to use it too, you can get access to the SOAP service in a variety of ways: Read the documentation to see how to create clients to your existing workspaces; try out Socialtext Open; or talk with your representative at Socialtext.

But wait, there’s more! We’ve also been working on our data oriented API. We’re calling it REST at the risk of inviting criticism. We hope we get it right. We shall see, sometime in early Fall.

Our REST framework is based on Matthew O’Connor’s REST::Application package. He and Matt Liggett have set things up so it is very easy to represent our core resources in useful ways.

Although we’re not quite done with the API, we’ve started some clients. Zac Bir and Matt Liggett have built News Boy, a desktop PyObjC client to Socialtext that lets you track and view workspace content from an OS X machine. We’ll release it when the REST API goes beta.

Kirsten Jones has started strut (SocialTextRESTUnifiedThing), a command line tool for putting stuff in workspaces. Kirsten says, “That’s right, ’strut’. Because that’s what we all feel like doing when we play in this code. Strutting about.” strut is designed, in part, to help people import converted data from wiki systems into Socialtext.

These tools exist at a remove from the core Socialtext system. There is a well defined and simple interface between them allowing each to evolve independently.

Which is rather the whole point.