[ckan-dev] Steve Yegge on Platforms

Mon Oct 17 09:18:51 UTC 2011

On 16 October 2011 12:23, Friedrich Lindenberg <
friedrich.lindenberg at okfn.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> really interesting read on G+ about how Google fails to be a platform:
> https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesvaVX - this
> is long, but IMO worth reading. For me, this is raising the question
> of how this applies to OKF and CKAN in particular: everything we do is
> platformish, yet little is accessible API-wise - and I think for CKAN
> we are still in need of the clear killer app (issues, if you ask me).
>

Friedrich,

Really interesting article - cheers for that. I'd agree it's good to have a
good API, although I'd say that Google have been pretty successful
generally, despite their poor APIs ;-)

I think you're being a little unfair on CKAN though, because the API has
given full access to the data since version 0.6, over three years ago. Sure,
we have had a few private services that manipulate that same data, such as
tag completion, but since these are trivial operations I don't see it as
much of a barrier. And we've also built a permissions model, which has not
had explicity APIs, but that is set to change:

Since the Spring we've been working to make channel our Web UI's
interactions with CKAN data via a new 'Logic Layer'. This is also exposed
*in full* to the world as the 'Action API'. This API has not been announced
yet, but a trial version went out last month in CKAN v1.4.3. Check out the
docs: http://readthedocs.org/docs/ckan/en/latest/apiv3.html It's designed to
be friendly to calling with javascript, so it's standard RPC, not onerous
and provides good status and error messages. It is also designed to return
help text (although there's not much there yet) and we have planned for it
to be discoverable too. So once we've got that, I think Steve Yegge would
approve.

It's been a substantial refactor internally to get it, and it's a difficult
'sell' because it's not very visible, but it's just this sort of
encouragement that we need to finish it off and start encouraging other
imaginative people to write meaningful apps onto this wonderful
data/metadata.

David

>
> Anyway: enjoy the article.
>
> - Friedrich
>
> --
> Open Knowledge Foundation
> Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age
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>
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