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

[Franz Koch]

Hey Helmut,

>> 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

I should have. Next time then :)

> 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.

Ok, no problem. Thanks for your great work in the security team.

>> 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

Thanks a lot.

> 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.

Ok. I fear that I'm also not a good project leader for this, due to lack 
of knowledge/founded experiences with creating webservices.

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

yes, after thinking of it again, a router is heavily needed. Also a 
dispatcher, exchangeable transportation layers, data handlers/providers etc.

> 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.
...
> 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.

Yes, the transport layer stuff might be the easiest task of all this. 
But I'm not sure if we need ONE data handling layer that has to cover 
everything. Of course there should be some generic data 
provider/handler, but every service should be able to implement domain 
specific data handlers etc.
After I got the job, I'll build up a first concept and open it up for 
discussion.

-- 
kind regards,
Franz Koch