[rest-practices] Atom as a generic container? [was Re: Media types]

[Bob McWhirter]

Yah, I personally don't like the wrap-it-all-in-atom strategy.  
Boilerplate is bad.

Bob

--
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On Apr 16, 2010, at 8:06 AM, Bryan Kearney <bkearney at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 04/16/2010 05:22 AM, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
>> On Thu, 2010-04-15 at 08:44 -0400, Bill Burke wrote:
>>
>>>  >        application/vnd.rht.rhevm.vm+xml;version=1
>>>  >        application/vnd.rht.rhevm.host+xml;version=1
>>>  >        application/vnd.rht.rhevm.collection.vm+xml;version=1
>>>  >        application/vnd.rht.rhevm.collection.host+xml;version=1
>>>  >
>>>
>>> IMO, the above two are ok.  Atom does it!
>>
>> Okay, you're going to need to help me out here :-)
>>
>> We're talking about the format of the document returned by e.g.
>> 'GET /vms'. At the moment, we're just doing:
>>
>>   <collection>
>>     <vm>
>>     </vm>
>>     ...
>>   </collection>
>
>
> I think an xml structure like this will make it harder for any auto- 
> clients such as ruby. I would suggest to get <vms/> as the wrapper.
>
>>
>> You're suggesting using Atom as a generic container format, right?
>>
>> Eoghan suggested something similar here:
>>
>>   https://fedorahosted.org/pipermail/rhevm-api/2010-April/000025.html
>>
>>> application/atom+xml
>>
>> This would just be e.g.:
>>
>>   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
>>   <atom:feed xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
>>     <atom:title>VMs feed</atom:title>
>>     <atom:updated>2010-04-16T09:47:55.288+01:00</atom:updated>
>>     <atom:id>http://{host}/vms</atom:id>
>>     <atom:author>
>>       <atom:name>RHEV-M</atom:name>
>>     </atom:author>
>>     <atom:entry>
>>       <atom:title>vm2</atom:title>
>>       <atom:content>
>>         <vm>
>>           <link rel="self" href="http://{host}/vms/3"/>
>>           <id>3</id>
>>           <name>vm3</name>
>>           <actions>
>>             ...
>>           </actions>
>>         </vm>
>>       </atom:content>
>>
>> That's simple enough:
>>
>>   http://git.fedoraproject.org/git/?p=rhevm-api.git;a=commitdiff;h=3fff835a
>>
>> But now, what about supporting clients who prefer json or yaml? Does
>> "application/atom+json" make much sense, I wonder?
>>
>>> application/atomcat+xml
>>
>> We'd use this to describe e.g. 'vm' and 'host' categories?
>
> So... one of he items I heard about why REST and not SOAP is that  
> the SOAP envelope is terrible. What I see here is starting to look  
> like such an envelope. Will you be supporting "natrual" xml and json  
> as well?
>
>
> --bk
>
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