[kde-services-devel] LokaRest and the story behind it

[Frank Karlitschek]

Hi Josef


this sounds great. I think a lightweight and flexible REST library is  
exactly what we need in KDE now.


Cheers
Frank



On 31.08.2008, at 20:28, Josef Spillner wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> There's a cool new service-centric KDE framework available at:
> http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/LokaRest
>
> It started out as the necessity to set properties on people to  
> indicate
> whether they're buddies or should be ignored. This is a common  
> functionality
> with all sorts of social applications, including chat, gaming and  
> general
> social networking.
>
> A previous such widget only saved these properties locally. This  
> makes it
> harder to switch clients, to access from other locations (roaming)  
> and to
> look at the properties on web pages.
> Therefore, LokaRest is able to synchronise such properties with a  
> web service
> by providing a unified RESTful interface to them.
>
> Currently, there is a somewhat silly demo application included with  
> it that
> allows you to change values in a QTableView and synchronises them  
> online. In
> the future this framework will be used for KDE 4.2 online gaming,  
> among other
> use cases.
>
> Here are a couple of issues when dealing with REST in KDE:
>
> * On the lowest level, there is KIO. But KIO is very unsuitable for  
> this task.
> The basic operations needed for REST are absolutely undocumented,  
> don't
> always work and don't have a consistent semantic. For example, for  
> POST
> there's a dedicate KIO::http_post method but not for the others.  
> KIO::put maps
> correctly to the HTTP PUT method but forgets its metadata, including  
> the
> essential content type. This needs a serious cleanup.
> Any volunteers for KIO improvements?
>
> * On the middle level, LokaRest would be used. Some aspects like  
> caching and
> restarting failed operations are currently not yet fully  
> implemented, but
> this will be solved soon enough.
>
> * On the high level, there's still space for another framework or a  
> LokaRest
> extension which can map resource models efficiently so one doesn't  
> always
> have to mess around with URIs and the like.
>
> That's all for today, and I'd like to hear comments of course :-)
>
> Josef
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--
Frank Karlitschek
karlitschek at kde.org