This was more a wonderment and musing more than anything else. Several high-profile applications, especially in blogging have developed RPC interfaces for submitting and retrieving content. Immediately sprining to mind is Movable Type which has a very comprehensive API. Last night, I started poking at the idea of a Module "driver" as opposed to a Movable Type "module". The idea behind it (in simplified ASCII art) is:

Xoops => MT Driver Module => Movable Type RPC => Movable Type

The process could also be developed for the retrieval of information (via a feed). As a result, the only maintenance that needs to be done is making sure that the driver module is current with both the external program's API as well as the XOOPS module format. Variables such as Movable Type table names can be set in the XOOPS Module Config files.

Has anyone else toyed with this idea and had any experience with this sort of idea? It could make development for 3rd party applications a lot easier.

~Jakob

So if i'm following you. the idea would be to have a module which was exclusively used to keep track of any xml-rpc api you wanted to communicate with, and the requirements for sending and recieving xml messages with that api.

Then this module could also provide a class which would make using that api (getting or recieving xml messages) inside XOOPS modules/blocks easier.

I suppose there needs to be a motivator to make use of a specific api in xoops. How would the moveable type api benefit XOOPS users? The api that immediately comes to mind is amazon and google. It could be interesting to use these in all sorts of modules.

Ahem, sorry for the really delayed reply, some stuff in life came up (as always seems the case).

The major benefit to this is integration with existing technology. I am a huge proponent of xoops-designed modules, and often take NewBB over their counterparts. I am almost greatly opposed to hacking core files just to integrate XOOPS with other technologies. Some web applications provide, however, an XML-RPC interface that could be called from XOOPS to submit or retrieve information. The API for it rarely changes, meaning that the same interface usually works from revisionn to revision. I use movable type as an example only because I am somewhat familiar with the posting API. The major bonus of the "module driver" idea would be that XOOPS could for example, post a blog to Movable Type through MT's api interface, and retrieve records using the same module driver.

Given my current position (and new job) it turns out that sometimes the biggest drawbacks to using XOOPS in a business environment is the inability to get it to work with existing technology xyz without having to try and migrate everything. Plus, by writing a module that interfaces with the API, there isn't any core code rewriting going on.

(The springboard for this of course is to research XOOPS own RPC interface if it has one, and see how to for example, make posts by email, have a simple application manage your news postings, update modules, etc)