Re: RAPI Spec Comments

["Hugo Rabson" <Hugo@www.nashville-now.com>]

On Monday, December 13, 1999 4:14 PM, Aaron Turner <aturner@linuxkb.org>
wrote:-
[...]
> I'd like the RAPI to support ALL the features of the
> web interface.  People who write apps to use the RAPI don't have to use
> them, but it would be nice to offer it.

I agree: we should offer as large a subset as possible of the search
engine's interactive capabilities.

Is the search engine's web page and/or cgi script near completion?

If the search engine's "Search LinuxKB" web page is finished, I could
document the form's POST parameters (you'll use a form, right?) & write a
tcl wrapper so that a programmer can execute a search by calling
"search-linuxkb.tcl" (or write their own code based on the API).

If the API specs are based on the cgi script, that'll kill two birds with
one stone: programmers will have access to all the facilities afforded to
'human' web-searchers, and I'll be able to get to work on a shell script to
call the search engine.

So, which comes first? :) Do we write the cgi script & then document it for
programmers, or do we come up with a good API & then write the cgi script to
suit?

Comments?

Hugo
...going home in 30 mins ;) Back at 9am CET