[development] SoC: Multi-site administration through rich XUL client

[Daniel Convissor]

Hi Ben:

On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 01:09:41PM +0100, Ben Francis wrote:
> My current favourite proposed SoC project is: Multi-site administration
> through rich XUL client (http://drupal.org/node/60507)
> 
> Would an appropriate solution to this be to write a module with
> functions for administering multiple sites and then write a
> SOAP/REST/XML-RPC API which is called by the XULRunner client?

Pardon my piping in so late on this very interesting idea.

I have now been working for a year on an application that uses XUL on the 
front end and PHP on the back.

The simplest way to communicate is have the front end use HttpRequest to 
send a POST that looks something like this when it arrives in PHP:

  $_POST['json'] = 
  '{"function":"login","parameters":{"name":"foo","password":"bar"}}';

Then extract and decode it into a PHP array (we're using the JSON 
implementation proposed for PEAR):

  $request = $json->decode($_POST['json']);

You'll now have an array called $request with the function name and 
parameters in it you can pass into the backend system.

For responses, we create PHP arrays that we then throw at an output 
function that basically does this:

  echo "var $name = " . $json->encode($data) . ";\n";

Couldn't be simpler.  This is WAY WAY WAY easier than XML_RPC, SOAP, etc.

I hope your proposal gets accepted.

Good luck,

--Dan

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