Hi all,
I’m in the processing of refactoring Puppet[1]'s networking, which
currently uses xmlrpc over https but I’m moving to REST, and I’m
hoping to be able to rely largely on existing code for the new work.
The weird situation with Puppet is that I’m only interested in
computer-computer communication and in most cases have no interest in
multiple forms of a given object, so I don’t think I need views, and
I’m not using a db backend, which means I don’t need an ORM like
ActiveRecord. Basically, I just need the controllers and routing, I
think.
I’ve looked around at most of the frameworks I can find, including
Nitro, Merb, Camping, and Rails, and all of them seem to assume that
I care deeply about databases and HTML, while really all I want to do
is make it easy to provide a REST-like interface for my software to
use to talk to itself.
I plan on using ActiveResource[2] for the clients, and I’d love
something that was just as easy but handled the server side for me.
I’ve got 9 different namespaces in xmlrpc right now, but I want it to
be easy to add new controller types, of course.
One of my biggest concerns with whatever I use is that it be easy to
distribute, since Puppet runs on all popular platforms (e.g., os x,
debian, ubuntu, rhel, fedora, solaris, freebsd) and is available as a
native package in most cases. I don’t want people packaging puppet
to also have to package 10 other prerequisites, so I don’t want to
rely on something that brings in 50 libraries to handle views or
models that I won’t use.
Anyone have any experience writing something like this? Can anyone
point me to an easy server-side REST api creator, something with few
dependencies and that focuses on the routing? There are some things
I’ve been told are in Rails that I’d also like, like content-type
negotiation and automatic serialization and deserialization, since
I’m sometimes passing YAML around (although often just plain text).
Thanks,
Luke
1 - http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet
2 - http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/ActiveResource
–
Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break
your word or lose your self-respect. – Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
Luke K. | http://reductivelabs.com | http://madstop.com