Technical cabal 20th nov 2012

Aeolus Tech Cabal: 20/11/2012

Attendees

• Tomas Sedovic
• Martyn Taylor
• Jason Guiditta
• Scott Seago
• Eric Healms
• Michal Fojtik
• Greg Blomquist
• Jaramori Coufal

Agenda

Procedural Items

Meeting Format: Hugh will send format to the list before next Cabal Meeting

Meeting Time:
    2pm Tuesday Recurring.
     1 hour max.
    Items not covered will be raised in next meeting
Awesome
    1st Post: Martyn Taylor
    Respoibilities
          Ensure agenda is adequate
        Ensure meetings move forward.
Secretary:
    Weekly rotation: Next: Greg Blomquist
    Responsibilites
        Take Minutes
        Distribute Minutes

Technical

API Resource Representation.

When shall we use full resource and minimal (link) resource representation in the API?
How should we allow client to access these resources?

Martyn Proposed we represent full resources in all top level collections. Sub resources will be represented as a collection (with url) when one to many relationship is present. Sub resource collections will include minimal resources.

Scott agreed this could solve many of the issues we are currently facing with the API and would be useful in the API.

Greg mentioned that this could cause some issues with configure. But will seek advice from Eck

Cabal voted in favour of proposal.

Actions:

Greg will Confirm with Eck
Martyn will send mail to list further explaining the proposal.
Martyn will inform API contributers of changes.

Instance State Machine

How do we represent state changes in the API?  Particularly for instances, deployments and deployables.

Michal spoke about using actions and links that represent state changes.

It was agreed that this is not strictly RESTful. Discussion around pure REST v usability started, but the Cabal came to no conclusion on the matter.

Michal advised us to take a look at the CIMI documentation (http://dmtf.org/sites/default/files/standards/documents/DSP0263_1.0.1.pdf). Since the API resembles ours in many ways.

Actions:

CIMI investigation
Further discussion on the list.  
Initial topic next meeting.  (If unresolvable on list)

Outstanding Agenda Items

API versioning - Supporting for versioning the API (Not for supporting multiple version)
    URL v HTTP Header (Server HTTP header?)
    e.g. http://docs.openstack.org/api/openstack-identity-service/2.0/content/Versions-d1e472.html#d8e186 
API Paging/Filtering/Sorting?
    http://blog.apigee.com/detail/restful_api_design_can_your_api_give_developers_just_the_information
API Race Conditions
Handling Deltacloud exceptions in Deltacloud - What need to be done to improve it..
Callbacks in Deltacloud - When, how and who :-)