Hi everybody,
I'm delighted to announce that we've recently updated our REST API with
some exciting performance enhancements, bug fixes, and improvements to
the developer documentation!
The most up-to-date version of the CC REST API is now rooted at
http://api.creativecommons.org/rest/staging/.
To read more about this release, visit the staging version's
documentation. http://api.creativecommons.org/docs/readme_staging.html
The staging and development APIs are currently in beta, and we are
soliciting feedback and suggestions. As such, the API may change in the
future.
The staging version of the CC REST API has been entirely rewritten to be
more maintainable, faster, and stable.
Boasting points:
* Cleaner CC0 implementation
* Lightened dependencies
* Ease of extensibility
* Improved documentation
* Comprehensive and rigorous test suite
* CC "sanity" work use case!
To iterate on a couple of those points:
Improved documentation --- The main focus of improving the REST API's
documentation was to reduce the amount of confusion surrounding how the
individual work-info elements affect an HTML+RDFa license result. The
most up-to-date documentation for this release can be found at
http://api.creativecommons.org/docs/readme_staging.html#providing-work-information,
which elaborates more on this issue.
CC0 --- In order to get CC0 into previous versions of the REST API, a
grotesque monkey-patch was required [1]. The patch resulted in longer
response times for CC0 issues than the typical latency experienced with
the standard licenses' requests. This has been resolved in the latest
release, and the CC0 integration has been tremendously improved. We have
also corrected the inconsistencies that existed between CC0 and standard
license issues in how work-info elements were handled in the HTM+RDFa
output.
Some background on why this work was needed...
Historically, the REST API's issued parametrized license results via the
license_xsl library, the same library that powered the license chooser
accessible at http://creativecommons.org/choose/. license_xsl relies on
XML/XSLT for it's core logic and over the years has become increasingly
difficult to maintain and bloated. This made things to difficult to
scale our services as the CC organization continues to grows -- recall
how long it took for us to get around to supporting CC0 :)
license_xsl is to be relieved of it's duties at CC by the cc.license
project sometime here in the near future. The newly built CC API is one
such example of a license_xsl decommission. The REST API is now backed
by the cc.license library, which provides the API's core logic for
issuing licenses based upon sets of user parameters.
Your comments, feedback and suggestions can be sent to
cc-de...@creativecommons.org and are always very welcomed and encouraged :)
Regards,
John Doig
JED3 @ irc.freenode.net/cc
[1] "insane monkey-patch":
http://code.creativecommons.org/viewsvn/api/branches/nose-test-suite-branch/support.py?r1=10185&r2=14085
<http://code.creativecommons.org/viewsvn/api/branches/nose-test-suite-branch/support.py?r1=10185&r2=14085>
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