Brainstorming for new Open Collaboration Services ideas and features.
New resources
Donations (micro-payments, google checkout, ePay, paypal, http://flattr.com/)
Comments (list comments linked to an item, add new comments to items, reply to existing comments)
Ratings (how many people already rated an item? have i rated an item?)
Observations about current API
Current API is not RESTful, is more service oriented. You can note this because it talks about Services, but it should talk about Resources
It duplicates several features already provided by HTTP, such as:
Status: HTTP responses already include Status codes, like "200 OK", "400 Bad request" and many others that specified in Error Reporting
HTTP methods. Some of the the service specifications include methods that are already HTTP verbs, like GET or PUT. All the resources should have a common REST interface. This common interface would facilitate code simplicity and reusability, as well as API clearness. An example of REST interface:
GET /resources |
list of resource instances |
GET /resources/id |
show specific resource |
POST /resources |
create resource when id is not known |
PUT /resources/id |
update resource or create resource when id is known |
DELETE /resources/id |
delete resource |
The provider resource
OCS API should be flexible enough to support several web applications, beyond implementation languages and frameworks (*PHP, Ruby on Rails, Django, etc..). The provider resource should be able to describe available resources, so the Desktop application or plasmoid is able to access and manage them.
It also would be interesting if the provider resource could describe other REST services already working, like Identi.ca/Twitter, Flickr/Picassa, Gitorious, etc..
Input / Output formats
The provider should announce which formats it accepts for resources. Examples of formats include iCalendar for Events or hCard/vCard for person profiles
Related Standards
There are currently several open standards that can be reused.
Activity Streams for defining Activities
Portable Contacts for Friends
OpenSearch for Searching
Knowledgebase extension for KDE Forums
See this mail: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/social-desktop/2010-May/000026.html