Hi Martin,
On Wed, 2013-04-10 at 15:53 +0200, Martin Povolny wrote:
I think that Jan's original idea was to expose sort-of-cleaned-up driver API as the universal library API.
That is mainly work through the controller methods that implement the API calls and
- identify and fix the places where there is any other code then such that parses and passes the inputs, outputs and error state between the REST remote call and the drivers.
- unify the driver interface where differences exist
Then just provide some class that basically delegates everything to a driver.
If by 'delegate' you mean 'wrap', i.e. have a tiny little bit of logic in between that allows us to adjust to changes in the driver API, then yes. Just as an example: we recently went through and made driver methods return empty arrays in a lot of places where they used to return nils. We need to have a place where we insulate library users from these sort of changes.
As I read it, what you suggest is implementing a Ruby-style API on top of the cleaned-up driver API.
Having such layer on top of that is not what Jan suggested, but it would surely be convenient from consumer point of view.
Also it would allow more changes in the driver API if the Ruby-style API would be what is advertised as "the thing" to the community. The Ruby-style API could then be the "air bag" that keeps the backward compatibility even if the driver API changes.
I personally like the idea as it is surely more Ruby-dev (community) friendly. But it is then a thing of a wider scope.
We should probably take a look at other libraries out there (both provider-specific and sort-of-universal, such as the Fog) to see the programming idioms that people might be already used to.
The reason I suggested the more Ruby-ish API is that I agree that we might be able to attract more people with the library API, but I don't think the current driver API is very attractive for that.
Geemus used to be very proud of the fact that Fog exposes a AR-inspired API - that's the kind of thing we should aim for here (not that I think AR is the right metaphor, but it's a good inspiration)
David