[Ovirt-devel] Ovirt QMF API Proposal

[David Lutterkort]

On Wed, 2009-04-01 at 16:44 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Tuesday, March 31 2009, Ian Main said:
> > Through much discussion it was decided that we would leverage the rails
> > models created for use in the WUI, and create an alternative way to
> > access these models, start tasks etc.  This will be integrated with the
> > current task management system (taskomatic) to produce a complete package.
> > 
> > The idea is to create a set of classes available via QMF as objects.
> > These classes would then be backed by either a mid-level API that
> > encompasses the models, or by active record models directly.  Any changes
> > made to these records outside of the API (eg by the WUI) would require
> > notification of changes to taskomatic.
> 
> So, by integrating deeply like this, how much is going to be tied to underlying 
> implementation details that (may|might|will) change in the future?  From
> looking through it, it seems very tightly tied which given the many
> unanswered questions, is at least of some concern imho.

Can you give examples of what in the API proposal worries you in that
regard ? What the QMF API exposes isn't too different from what the REST
API (would) expose.

> Also, who is the expected target user of this API?  Someone who is
> deploying guests within the cloud or someone who is managing the overall
> cloud?  As there's probably a different level of care for what are the
> important things to expose accordingly.  It looks more like the latter
> but with a mix of some of the former, but at a far more detailed level
> than a cloud user would need/want

The API is targetted at both - whether an 'ordinary' cloud user is
allowed to do certain operations is a question of permissions.

Some of that complexity will/can be hidden with more targetted tools on
top of the API, either in the form of a client library or the command
line tools that I started writing a while ago, but never finished.

David