On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 11:47 PM, Jeremy Shaw
A RESTful API with JSON results sounds perfect. I will be surprised if the API useful for 3rd party sites happens to map on to the URL structure used by the main site. But if that works, all the better :)
Of course, if your site which is creating the JSON is written in Haskell, and my site which is using it is written in Haskell, then it would be nice if I could somehow benefit from the haskell type checker telling me that you have changed your JSON a bit.
In some small experimental RESTful-ish sites a I have made I tend to make the return values of the API be an algrebraic data type that all the API functions return. Then I have functions like SiteRetVal -> JSON, SiteRetVal -> XML, etc, which makes it easy to convert the output to whatever format the client wants. With a system like that, it is possible to have the SiteRetVal be in it's own hackage library. Your site and my site would both depend on that package. Then when you change the API return values, I get a new version of that library to type-check against... Not sure how valuable/feasible it is in practice though. I have only developed a prototype far enough to determine that it *can* be done. Whether it *should* be done remains to be seen.
There's one better: in addition to providing JSON output, I could provide the output of the default Show typeclass (call the mimetype x-text/haskell-show?), and then you can just use a readMay on your end. Still using the intermediate package idea.
Also, there maybe be some issues with using the accept header. In theory, you may someday provide XML (in addition to JSON). But I think that some browsers list xml has a higher preference than html. So then normal browser users will start getting xml instead of html?
I don't think any browsers list text/xml by default, rather application/xhtml+xml, though I could be wrong.
Anyway, the basic idea of a simple RESTful API with JSON is exactly what I was hoping for. The rest is implementation details, which I don't care much about as long as it works. I definitely do not want to turn this into a design by committee project.
Also, once the site is 'done', it would be nice to hirer a graphic designer to give it a nice, clean, professional look.
Of course, if we want to make this an enterprise project, we would do the graphic design by committee. "I think blue is a nice color" "Yes, but isn't that excluding the 50.23% of our target audience that's female?" "Do women not like blue?" "Let's take a vote, all in favor of women not liking blue?" ... "OK, so as not be gender specific, we'll use a black background with mauve text." Sounds like a good idea to me. Michael