[TYPO3-dev] Re: [TYPO3-mvc] Implementing REST/generic webservice for Typo3/extbase

[Helmut Hummel]

Hi Franz,

On 06.08.10 01:21, Franz Koch wrote:
> 
> this is a cross post on typo3v3mvc and typo3.dev mailing list. Please
> answer in the dev mailing list as the main goal is about a generic
> webservice for TYPO3 - thanks.

You could have set a follow-up for that :-P

> Many of the participants (including me) where interested in creating a
> flexible webservice framework for TYPO3 and some (f.e. Fabrizio) already
> joined the project on forge [1]. As I didn't hear anything about it
> anymore I'd like to ask if there is some work going on on this in the
> background and who else is interested in joining forces on this.

You didn't hear anything because nothing happened so far.

I'm currently overwhelmed with other stuff, actually the TYPO3 security
release and fixing the regression this caused took a lot of my time and
energy.

> Helmut, if you read this: Could you please share the ideas/concepts if
> you got them? IIRC somebody created flowcharts on his laptop. Best might
> be on the forge project - thanks. (if you already shared it, I didn't
> find them - sorry).

I added the documents as Internal-Documents, because I didn't know until
now, that I can attach documents to wiki pages also:

http://forge.typo3.org/projects/extension-typo3_webservices/wiki/T3DD10

In general I think that someone (or a small group) must take the
reposibility to get this done, if not nothing will continue to happen.

After a lot of thinking especially after the workshop I hosted, I have
the feeling that I'm not the right person to do this. I would be happy
to contribute and share my knowlege on this topic, but will not drive
this forward, but rather focus on other tasks in the community.

At last some notes to the technical part.

Of course it would be cool to have some fancy extbase REST webservice,
probably with a nice router (like Fernando mentioned).

But I'm pretty sure that this would not be enough. The difficult stuff
will start after having that REST implementation. I fear (if nothing is
done conceptually after that step) that every extension serving REST
requests would "answer" differntly to similar requests.

So what is needed would be a good concept about what makes sense to be
requested and how a response should look like, so that you would be able
to achieve things in a reasonable an standardized way.

I write this, because when developing the typo3_webservice extension,
the part what I called "transport layer" at the workshop (in this case
the XMLRPC implementation, and for the planned webservice the
extbase/REST/ routing stuff) was breeze compared to the concept I had to
develop how data can be queried and what kind of data is sent back to
the requester enabling him doing something with the response. In numbers
I would say the latter part took about 90% of the time.

OK. Enough written for now. If you read until the end, thanks for your
attention and "Rock on" ;)

Regards Helmut