Blog API Part 2
Categories
I noticed that Chris has thrown down some of his thoughts about a blogging API. I'd really like to hear what some of the other "players" in the blogging industry think about this and who has been giving it some thought.
From some initial thinking I think that the API would need to be:
- SOAP based. All of the major frameworks have SOAP API's these days.
- Allow you to discover and obtain information about: Posts (including any attachments), Comments (including trackbacks), Categories.
- Able to get information at a very granular level - ie: be able to return items by a variety of parameters and be able to perform queries which return both verbose and terse resultsets.
The benefit of being able to perform queries that perform terse results is that it would make it easier to perform atomic operations (allowing for re-tries) over an unreliable transporation medium.
So, looking at the shortcomings of the existing API's I feel that they make it very difficult to perform operations such as:
- Get a count of posts
- Get a range of posts
- Cycle through all posts
- Retrieve attachments
- Discover linked documents
- Query for Trackbacks or Comments (ie: types of feedback)
The existing API's seem to make it easy to post new entries or to edit existing content - provided that you already know the address of it. In other words, those API's do not lend themselves to auto discovery of content; and that's exactly what you need if you are going to go about writing a migration tool.
One thing that I should mention here is that, by talking about a blogging API I'm not talking about Rss. Rss and blogging have managed to evolve separately and should remain separate.