Re: [ruby-fs-stack] Moving to the New FamilySearch Platform

[Roger Pack]

Either way here :)

On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 2:00 PM, Jimmy Zimmerman
<zimme...@familysearch.org> wrote:
> I've been asked by several people about an update to this library or a new
> library for moving to the new FamilySearch Platform. I'd like to know who on
> this list would be interested in collaborating on such a project.
>
> Here are a few things that have been kicking around in my head that I'd like
> some feedback on.
>
> New Approach?
> The FamilyTree/v2 and other modules used to be very URL-template-driven.
> Meaning, that you would construct a URL via /familytree/v2/person/{id}.
> Thus, the ruby-fs-stack library was written to mirror that type of resource
> mapping.
>
> The new platform is HATEOAS driven, so rather than constructing URLs, the
> idea is to discover resource URLs by starting at a Discovery resource and
> then following links based upon "rel" attributes of links. Links can be
> bookmarked anywhere along the way to act as starting points. This took me a
> while to wrap my mind around, but it works much like any kind of screen
> scraping or web crawling— for which I usually use Mechanize. I've written
> code in Node.js that embraces the HATEOAS principles and it seemed to work
> quite well.
>
> The thing with the new HATEOAS approach is that it seems that it would
> change the approach to building a library. The new Platform can still work
> with a URL template approach, but it is less robust in case a URL structure
> ever changes. This is what brings me to the question: New library? Or
> upgrade the existing one using same old approach?
>
> New HTTP Engine?
> The current ruby-fs-stack library uses the standard Ruby Net::HTTP libraries
> for its communications. I think it would be nice to use a library that
> abstracts that a bit like RestClient. For parts of the the API that
> ruby-fs-stack doesn't cover well, I usually have just hacked together code
> that makes requests via RestClient. It has worked fairly well too.
>
> What are you hoping for in a Ruby Library?
> I don't know what other people are hoping to do with the library. What are
> the use cases? Are you looking for full read/write capabilities?
>
> What did you not like with ruby-fs-stack?
> What would you do differently in designing a new library? Or how would you
> enhance the current library for the new Platform?
>
> Any feedback is greatly appreciated!
>
> Jimmy Zimmerman