librest ======= This library has been designed to make it easier to access web services that claim to be "RESTful". A reasonable definition of what this means can be found on Wikipedia [1]. However a reasonable description is that a RESTful service should have urls that represent remote objects which methods can then be called on. However it should be noted that the majority of services don't actually adhere to this strict definition. Instead their RESTful end-point usually has an API that is just simpler to use compared to other types of APIs they may support (XML-RPC, for instance.). It is this kind of API that this library is attempting to support. It comprises of two parts: the first aims to make it easier to make requests by providing a wrapper around libsoup [2], the second aids with XML parsing by wrapping libxml2 [3]. Making requests ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ When a proxy is created for a url you are able to present a format string. This format string is intended to represent the type of path for a remote object, it is then possible to bind this format string with specific names of objects to make this proxy concrete rather than abstract. We abstract the parameters required for a particular call into it's own object which we can then invoke both asynchronously and pseudo-asynchronously (by spinning the main loop whilst waiting for an answer.) This has the advantage of allowing us to support complex behaviour that depends on the parameters, for instance signing a request: a requirement for many web services. Handling the result ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Standard XML parsers require a significant amount of work to parse a piece of XML. In terms of a SAX parser this involves setting up the functions before hand, in terms of a DOM parser this means dealing with complexity of a DOM tree. The XML parsing components of librest are designed to try and behave a bit like the BeautifulSoup parser [4]. It does this by parsing the XML into an easily walkable tree were nodes have children for their descendents and siblings for the nodes of the same type that share the same parent. This makes it easy for instance to get a list of all the "photo" nodes in a document from the root. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer [2] - http://live.gnome.org/LibSoup [3] - http://xmlsoft.org/ [4] - http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/