@whouston,

glad to see people interested in that topic. OpenERP currently is not that far 
from REST but it's not REST. It's not that far in the sense that:
* every business method + CRUD is allowed via webservice (XML/RPC)
* it is not bound to a session concept: so it will scale up like a REST system 
(load balancing is easy for instance).
* it has or less an auto discoverable services (eTiny does just that), but it's 
far from rely on any standard and rely on the field_view_get method and the 
view dialect.

On the contrary it's not yet REST in the sense that:
* XML/RPC is on the top of HTTP POST (only) and doesn't leverage the HTTP verbs 
semantic (GET, PUT, POST , DELETE) as REST would require. It doesn't take 
advantage from the idempotence of some of those methods (that would make 
caching more efficient).

I don't think talking to eTiny via HTTP directly fixes those points.

Now what can be done for a better REST support?
* I think Turbogears (means talking through eTiny) is itself making progress 
toward REST.

* I myself started to build a simple (J)Ruby on Rails ActiveResource wrapper 
exposing OpenERP models through standard Rails REST (the best REST support I've 
ever seen) much like eTiny but in a RESTful way, without hardcoding anything 
(my model is generic and adapt smoothly to all existing OpenERP models). Under 
the hood, it's backed by XML/RPC to the standard OpenERP server.
So far I've the GET method working fine for any model. I spent only a few hours 
on it but if anyone is interested in such a layer, we could team up and build 
something better and compete.

* This week end I also tried to have OpenERP running on the top of Java 
(Jython), even with diabled features like reporting. So far, I'm able to start 
up the server on Jython (with some hacks), and making it correctly receive, 
parse and interpret XML/RPC calls. I've the OpenERP server sitting on the top 
of the DB API2.0 for Jython (http://www.jython.org/docs/zxjdbc.html ), with 
pooling disabled so far. But then it seems to fail to answer correctly. No time 
yet to investigate if that's because of Jython bugs or because I didn't yet 
worked around the specific ways OpenERP uses psycopg2 (I think that's mostly 
that). Once on the top of Jython, an OpenERP server would be able to talk REST 
trough a variety of efficient libraries like JAX-RS (and SOAP also). Even is 
not everything might be working, we could still have a second instance of 
OpenERP running on the top of Java, in order to address such specific needs.

I'll probably blog around those possibilities when I get a chance to experiment 
more in that direction. Feel free to provide feedback too.

Raphaël Valyi.

------------------------
http://www.smile.fr




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