BzAPI Compatibility API has been rolled out to production BMO

[David Lawrence]

Until recently, Bugzilla supported only older Web technologies, namely XMLRPC and JSONRPC. The BMO team created a new REST API
in the summer of 2013 to provide a modern Web interface to Bugzilla.

Prior to the native REST API[1], a separate proxy service called BzAPI[2] was created that provided a REST API using data
obtained through the older RPC interfaces as well as various other Bugzilla data sources, including CSV representations. This
was a great interim solution, but now that we have a native API, and since the system hosting the proxy is not maintained by
Mozilla IT, the BzAPI service will need to be decommissioned at some point. Check out the wiki page[3] for the differences
between BzAPI and the native API.

To ease the transition, we have created a native BzAPI compatibility layer (bug 880669[4]) that acts almost exactly the same
as BzAPI but will translate the queries to the native API layer. Thus clients who currently use BzAPI will just need to change
the REST URL to the built-in API[5], which is slightly different from the native one[6].

Even though we've done our own testing, we are interested in having more people test the compat API by changing their
dashboards, scripts, apps, etc. to point to the compat API URL instead of the BzAPI proxy. Then try to see if anything doesn't
display properly, is missing, or generates an error of some kind. We have a component[7] in Bugzilla under the BMO product that
we would like people to use to let us know. You can also browse[8] for bugs that have already been submitted.

We plan to leave the compat API in place for the foreseeable future, but we do not plan to make any major changes or
enhancements to it. We will be working to enhance the native REST API instead with the upstream Bugzilla community. So any
requests for improvements or new features will need to be directed the native API component[9].

Thanks
Mozilla BMO Team

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/BMO/REST
[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugzilla:REST_API
[3] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugzilla:API_Comparison
[4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=880669
[5] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/bzapi
[6] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/rest
[7] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=bugzilla.mozilla.org&component=Extensions%3A%20BzAPI%20Compatibility
[8] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=bugzilla.mozilla.org&component=Extensions%3A%20BzAPI%20Compatibility
[9] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Bugzilla&component=WebService

[Josh Matthews]

[5] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/bzapi
[6] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/rest

These URLs do not lead to real pages.

Cheers,
Josh

[Mark Côté]

Those are just the API root paths, for reference. For example, to view
a bug, they would be

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/bzapi/bug/35
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/rest/bug/35

Mark

[jmo...@mozilla.com]

This is terrific!

The docs make mention of POST under bz_rest_options. Do you now (or will you at some point) support bug creation via API? Would you do full CRUD at some point?

I'm excited to tinker with this. I'd guess REST support will eventually lead to more creative interfaces on top of Bugzilla.

[Mark Côté]

On 2014-06-25, 3:21 PM, jmo...@mozilla.com wrote:
> This is terrific!
>
> The docs make mention of POST under bz_rest_options. Do you now (or will you at some point) support bug creation via API? Would you do full CRUD at some point?

Yes, the native REST API already supports bug creation (as the older
XMLRPC and JSONRPC APIs did):
http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/tip/en/html/api/Bugzilla/WebService/Bug.html#create

(Apologies for the API docs; they aren't great, but we're working on
better ones.)

Mark