[req] Vanilla API for seamless integration for developers

Kosmo

It would be swell (pun intended) if Mark would make API for Vanilla, I could integrate Vanilla for my up and coming RoR publishing platform for the creative soul. My intention is to steer away of the usual Blogging engine, and seek a better way for more technical discussion of methods and tools used invarious works, and frankly blog commenting is the worst thing for that, but a full fledged forum like Vanilla would be THE way to go. What say you? Did I set us up the bomb?

Krak

All your API are belong to us.

Bergamot

What's the difference between "an API" and the libraries we already have? Documentation?

Mark

What Bergamot said. Are you talking about web services?

Kosmo

I'm the visionaire, you come up with the nuts and bolts o_o

Minisweeper

But your vision doesnt really make sense (or isnt well enough explained)...

ithcy

i don't understand this either. i thought i had already been working with the vanilla API when developing extensions

Bergamot

And yeah, integrating People into other apps takes like 2 lines of code.

lech

I think what kosmo means by "API" here is by having all the hooks that vanilla already has without the shell. Meaning, you could pass arguments to it and get feedback without having a html/css front-end. Then doing with the passed back data as one would like. For example, creating an executable which gathers all the data and displays it in its own way then passes back data to reply without much page flipping, right?

Kosmo

Basically I was thinking that I could integrate the forum to my publishing platform seamlessly, like add the comment box that would add a comment to the forums and post x last comments and such and such. I have gandered the documentation and either I'm too much a relative of a boot or it's just not there. Like I can add a selection of my photos from flickr and have it jump hoops with their API. I don't know how sophisticated it would need to be to read posts with arguments and add posts with arguments to vanilla, but then again, I could just do some small app to manipilate the database and be done with it. Thanks anyway.

SavoryMedia

I think what Kosmo is talking about is using Vanilla to replace the comments function in his blog.

Mark

I'm gonna have to take a look at the flickr api at some point to see what all the fuss is about :)

Bergamot

Vanilla is very different from flickr, however, because flickr is centrally hosted, and therefore requires a well-defined API if other people want access to photos or other data.

As long as Vanilla and your non-vanilla code reside on the same server, there are way better ways to do content and session integration.

lech

Well, most api's in most cases all function in some similar fashion, regardless of whether they're centralized or not. I think the key objectives you want to accomplish is pulling data from it and throwing some data back at it via some alternate method. The only major difference is what kind of data you're sending between it and your application. In this case, your blog.

Kosmo

I completely understand that Vanilla is different from flickr, but I still think that it would be useful for me to reuse parts of my own design to integrate with vanilla, like if a person posts a message I could use hooks to post the data to the forum, and when they are logged in, they would have certain privelages in the forum and the blog side, but only one username and logging is needed. It would be easier to me to modify my code to work with Vanilla than build my code and then use hacks to get them work partially together breaking down on every update. I also understand that this isn't what Vanilla was originally intended to do, but using it as a semi-community tool would - for me - prove Vanilla's worth.

Mark

You can already do those things if you know how to code to a decent degree. All you're talking about is retrieving and manipulating things in the database, and you don't need any Vanilla code to do that. But if you wanted to, Vanilla is built on a whole framework that you can use to retrieve and manipulate data. There are already objects that you can use to operate on any type of data in Vanilla. I think Bergamot was right up there when he said what you are probably looking for is documentation for this framework that Vanilla is built on so that you can understand how to use it. Unless, of course, you already understand it - but it's not exactly what you had in mind.

Kosmo

Is there proper documentation existing for the framework?

Mark

Not really, no. All of the developer documentation is about as good as it gets. If I can ever get the time, I'd like to better comment the code itself, and then write a parser to go through the application and generate documentation from the comments. But that's down the line.

Kosmo

Well, we have to do with what we got.