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

[Ben Francis]

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