Debbugs Read/Write Soap Interface
Mentor: ?BastianVenthur is interested, see Debbugs/BTS people
Summary: overhaul the existing read-only SOAP Debbugs interface with submission and manipulation capabilities
Required skills:
- Perl
- SOAP
- Experience with the BTS
Description: The BTS and the underlying Debbugs software has a read-only SOAP interface. We'd like to extend it to a read/write interface that would be used by DebbugsWebUI or any bts tools.
Discussion
What about XML-RPC?
Maybe it's worth to evaluate the option to use XML-RPC instead of SOAP. It's SOAP's little sister, much cleaner and easier to grasp and probably much easier to implement on the server- and client side. I've written python-debianbts which is a SOAP client for Debian's BTS and it was a bit of a pain to write mainly because of the complicated structure of the datatypes SOAP provides. From my experience with debbugs' SOAP interface I think it might be possible to use XML-RPC instead.
-- ?BastianVenthur
Why not, but as there's already a SOAP interface for RO operations, completing it for RW makes probably more sense. -- OlivierBerger
What about synchronous/asynchronous operation
The debbugs interface for creating/modifying bugs is mainly asynchronous (queued emails incoming whose contents is parsed).
Such an API would be great if it was synchronous, but it seems it's not likely to be implementable unless debbugs gets a major rewrite (to be confirmed)... so an asynchronous API would probably be the way to go... but then is it really helpful ? What may be the consequences on the clients ?
Hope this leads to interesting issues and developments. -- OlivierBerger