[rt-users] New UX for RT: REST 2.0, json, and what?

[Alex Vandiver]

On Thu, 2014-03-06 at 17:21 +0100, akos.torok at docca.hu wrote:
> This is some kind of request for comment. Please, feel free to give us
> advice, support, ideas. If you have similar effort, if you know any
> solution that makes this problems causeless, let us know please!

Best Practical is always interested in contributions from the community
which improve the product.  As it happens, our focus for RT 4.4 is
planned to include a concentration on the UI, as well as a rewrite of
the REST API.

For RT 4.2, we held to our previous restrictions that the entirety of
the UI needed to be accessible to users without JS enabled.  With
JS-based UIs sufficiently prevalent now, it is our intent with RT 4.4
that JS will be a required part of the UI.

That being said, we do not intend to write the entirety of the UI in JS,
as a thin wrapper around back-end APIs.  Such a rewrite would be
extremely time-intensive, and unlikely to be able to duplicate all of
the features of the current server-side templating solution.

However, we're quite interested in improving the REST API.  The 1.0 REST
API was written well before the advent of JSON, and indeed before the
concept of "REST APIs" had begun to be commonplace -- as such, it has a
number of very odd design decisions that hinder extensibility.  Because
of this, we are uninterested in expanding on it, but are more focused on
providing a new implementation which is based on modern assumptions of
how REST APIs should function.

We currently have an initial sketch of a REST 2.0 already partially
completed, with the aim to release it as an extension for RT 4.2, in
core in RT 4.4, and remove REST 1.0 thereafter.  It is now published at
https://github.com/bestpractical/rtx-rest -- it also requires the RT
branch https://github.com/bestpractical/rt/tree/4.2/support-rest-v2  

Bear in mind that this is highly experimental; we do _not_ suggest its
use apart from developers working on it.  It is in no way
production-ready.  As we are aware it is lacking in features, pull
requests or patches welcome; simple bug reports are not helpful at this
juncture.

 - Alex