Daniel Convissor wrote:
Pardon my piping in so late on this very interesting idea.
Don't worry you're not late in the game, the specification for the Admin Client is far from set in stone, let alone the implementation details! I value your feedback.
I have now been working for a year on an application that uses XUL on the front end and PHP on the back.
When you say XUL on the front end do you mean as a desktop client or as a hosted XUL app? I assume the former.
The simplest way to communicate is have the front end use HttpRequest to send a POST
This is interesting because there are many different ways of creating "web services" and I think its important that we create something which is going to be useful to as many Drupal Administrators as possible. For me the most important goal for the server side of this project is to create a remote administration module which is going to be as flexible as possible and allow administrators to manage Drupal websites in their own preferred method. Whilst the XULRunner based client will form the bulk of the SoC project I see it as only one front end to the remote administration module - so the ease of development for the XUL client isn't necessarily the most important deciding factor. However, an important goal for me is defining a project that I can actually complete in the given time frame so I'm not going to ignore simpler implementation ideas. My writeup [1] on this proposal describes an XML-RPC API but that doesn't necessarily have to be how it is implemented. I don't want to open a can of worms here but it seems there is a large debate between resource oriented architectures and action oriented architectures (e.g. REST and RPC architectures respectively) of creating an API. There's also the possibility of using Json instead of XML, personally I'm leaning towards XML for reasons of flexibility rather than efficiency. I think this is the time to be discussing fundamental architecture issues like these. 1. http://ideas.hippygeek.co.uk/wiki/DrupalAdminClient Ben -- Ben "tola" Francis http://hippygeek.co.uk