Sunday 20 July 2014

Strehler 1.2.1: the hive

Strehler made the jump from 1.1.x to 1.2.x. Obviously, the first attempt had a dirty bug related to old perl versions, so the package we cleebrate now is the 1.2.1.

Strehler 1.2.1 is about Strehler frontend. No real front-end will be ever developed in the Strehler project, Strehler will never become a Wordpress or a Joomla! (but a CMS like them could be built on top of it). Otherwise, 1.1.x system is too limited, because it gives you no way to access contents you created. Yes, you can write a site that do that, but there's nothing out-of-the-box.

Most trendy way to serve contents in our days is through APIs, preferably APIs that some clever JS library like AngularJS can manage. So I added to the projct a package, Strehler::API, that, using the same logic of the admin views, generate paths to return Strehler contents in JSON(p) format.

Here below, the rules I found on internet about APIs that I used developing Strehler's (just a reminder for myself):

  • Return format is JSON. It's the most friendly for javascript and open systems. Other formats will probably follow in further development.
  • Along with JSON you can ask data in JSONp format in any situation, just adding a callback parameter. This is important when working with cross-domain platforms and... it's so easy to do that not implementing it would be just cruel.
  • JSON response content-type is 'application/json', JSONp response content-type is 'application/javascript' (don't laugh, there're many questions on Stackoverflow about this).
  • API path contains a reference to API version, so is /api/v1/... I can't imagine, now, a reason API version can change but it's always better to expect the unexpected.
  • Error codes are returned with a JSON content with the error message. In my opinion is right that error "pages" are JSON too, because whatever is calling your API, you can assume it's not a human being using a browser. Giving him back a kitten with a sorry face on 404 will be probably not easly understood by IT. (probably this feature should be improved a little, considering 1.2.1 version of the package)
  • Singular and no ending slash => an element, Plural and ending slash => a list. "Ending slash" rule is not written anywhere, it's just how I like things. I think it works well.