> My name is David Geilhufe, I'm the managing partner of CivicSpace and one of
the founders of the CiviCRM open
> source project.
Hi David!
Any idea when the next NGO mixer will be happening in the Houston area?
> A couple months ago we sat down with Alan Runyan at Enfold and reviewed our
APIs and integration
> architecture to verify CiviCRM could be integrated with Plone.
Yes. I had a few brief emails. Unfortunately I didnt have enough time to sit
down with the CTO from your organization. After my experiences of integrating
with democracy in action (deminaction at the cheeseshop) --
I learned quite a bit.
> Might be a good opportunity to integrate Plone with a fully
internationalized and localized CRM designed for NGO needs.
I agree. I would love for Plone/CivicCRM to have a integration.
> To date, no one has shown interest in providing NGOs integrated
functionality
with CiviCRM/Plone, though
> we are happy to provide support to anyone that wants to
spearhead the integration.
The only 'integration' point that was claimed 'stable' was using PHP api's
which are a layer around the relational database structure. Plone is written
in Python. So the obvious mechanism to integrate would be to read/write
directly against the RDBMS. This is a start! But I dont like this approach.
IMHO, the better way would be to integrate as though CivicCRM was a 'service'.
i.e. REST, XMLRPC, SOAP, etc. This way the RDBMS structure can change and
does not impact client code.
Finally - whoever writes the python code *must* write loads of doctests.
Democracy in Action integration uses REST style HTTP/XML and they break
things occassionally. I would imagine their RDBMS structure changes all
the time. NOTE: DIA is a commercial venture not a open code project.
But still. Our doctests give us protection/coverage against such breakage.
We run the tests every night. I suggest this approach towards CivicCRM
integration.
Big questions (from my point of view):
- When will CivicCRM have a service based integration point? i.e. all the
functionality that that PHP interface provides will be exposed via
HTTP/SOAP/etc?
- It doesnt have to be 100% service coverage of php interface. just
significant so you can do 80% of the work.
- If someone is willing to write a python api against their RDBMS - go for it!
and put it in the cheeseshop, http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi
In summary, if someone wants to team with civiccrm; we could do so and get
mileage immediately. providing a client api around their rdbms structure.
a longer term approach would be for civiccrm to land a supported stable
service-oriented web api. Last I understood the "web service" side of
civiccrm was for their mail integration; it didnt cover very much compared
to what could be done with php interface.
cheers
alan runyan
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