[Owncloud] ownCloud API

[Frank Karlitschek]

Cool. Let me know if I can help.



On 29.06.2012, at 15:53, Michael Gapczynski <mtgap at owncloud.com> wrote:

> Well I'm satisfied with that, I'll start writing up some stuff for a cloud 
> module.
> 
> 
> Michael
> 
> On Friday, June 29, 2012 01:45:00 PM Frank Karlitschek wrote:
>> On 28.06.2012, at 03:43, Michael Gapczynski <mtgap at owncloud.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I'm just worried that in this case someone will see the API is part of OCS
>>> and then get confused when they start looking through the OCS spec
>>> instead. It is designed for social networks correct?
>> 
>> Well, it can provide lot´s of different things. ownCloud is using it for
>> accessing and downloading of Apps and Knowledge Base entries for example.
>> ownCloud is also an OCS server for the key value storage and implements the
>> activities module to push events to the clients.
>> 
>> OCS is build in a modular way. Not everybody has to provide every module. We
>> would skip the social networking part obviously but implement a "cloud"
>> module and the other things we want to do.
>>> I'm also a little confused about what a
>>> provider is and why you have multiple providers on one server.
>> 
>> The idea is that a client can tak to several servers at the same time. So if
>> your syncing client has several ownCloud configured for example.
>>> What can the software that already implements OCS do if ownCloud extends
>>> OCS. Can we tie into the Social Desktop to find other ownCloud users
>>> (inter ownCloud sharing) or display news (the sync client performed a
>>> sync, a shared file was updated)? I might be wrong, but I believe that
>>> Social Desktop does stuff with People and Activity. If we can do this
>>> without changes to the existing software that implements OCS, then it
>>> sounds like it might be worth it.
>> 
>> It can and should be completely independent. That´s where the modules
>> concept in OCS comes in. Every OCS provider only implements the modules
>> that make sense.
>> 
>> Another benefit is with using OCS is that we already have a full working ocs
>> REST interface in ocs.php We only have to add the mdule and the new calls
>> that we want to support. All the rest including authentification is already
>> done. So this should be very easy.
>> 
>> Another benefit is that OCS is already a freedesktop.org standard so it
>> would be more professional for us to just use and extend it instead of
>> inventing something completely new.
>> 
>> And one more benefit is that there is already a Qt implementation of the API
>> called attica. We only have to add our new call and the integration into
>> our sync client and KDE will be very easy.
>>> If we go with extending OCS, I still believe that there should be an entry
>>> point outside of ocs/v1/ just to make developers aware that this isn't the
>>> full implementation of OCS.
>> 
>> This is also handled by the the providers concept. In providers.php is
>> defined which modules/servies are implemented on this server. Currently
>> only "activities". In the future we can extend this with our new "cloud"
>> module.
>> 
>> 
>> Frank