[Rt-devel] XUL interfaces

[Bob Goldstein]

That would be great! Or certainly interesting,
given that RT works pretty well as is.

Of course, I've never actually _written_ any XUL,
but I've read enough to ask dumb questions :-)

Firstly, XUL runs on the browser, but RT runs on the server.
I don't think you want to make direct calls to the database,
nor do you want to scrape html screens.  Both are too fragile.
You'll need a new communications protocol, similar to the
RT command line but over a network.

The protocol could be stateless, like http or SOAP,
in which case you'll have to do auth/auth on every call.
Or something with state, in which case you'll have to
cache and garbage-collect objects on a per-connection basis.
(And if you do cache objects, you have to make sure some other
process didn't change the underlying data during the caching.)

Are you planning some higher-level API? That way, a XUL client
could say "Retrieve all the info about all my queues and tickets
in a deep structure", or would you use a low-level api and break
that into many different calls?  (Maybe give each object
a remote-api?)


   bobg


>Hey,
>I was wondering if anyone is working on or has thought about an XUL 
>interface to RT?
>If not, i am happy to start working on one - if anyone wants to help out 
>or thinks its a bad idea, let me know.
>I reckon it would be useful to have RT spit out XUL ultimately.
>That would make it extremely useful in XUL aware browsers (like mozilla).
>Of course IE users might have to live with the old web interface, but hey.
>
>The plan I guess is to have a XUL interface that queries RT for queues, 
>users, tickets etc and displays it in a meaningful GUI layout, all XUL 
>like. Its basically and easy way to have a GUI on RT, allowing you to do 
>cooler GUI like interactions, without having to change what RT does.
>Its a fair bit of work I spose - let me know if anyone has any comments :)
>
>dave
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