Hey,
I was wondering if anyone is working on or has thought about an XUL
interface to RT?
If not, i am happy to start working on one - if anyone wants to help out
or thinks its a bad idea, let me know.
I reckon it would be useful to have RT spit out XUL ultimately.
That would make it extremely useful in XUL aware browsers (like mozilla).
Of course IE users might have to live with the old web interface, but hey.
The plan I guess is to have a XUL interface that queries RT for queues,
users, tickets etc and displays it in a meaningful GUI layout, all XUL
like. Its basically and easy way to have a GUI on RT, allowing you to do
cooler GUI like interactions, without having to change what RT does.
Its a fair bit of work I spose - let me know if anyone has any comments
dave
That would be great! Or certainly interesting,
given that RT works pretty well as is.
Of course, I’ve never actually written any XUL,
but I’ve read enough to ask dumb questions
Firstly, XUL runs on the browser, but RT runs on the server.
I don’t think you want to make direct calls to the database,
nor do you want to scrape html screens. Both are too fragile.
You’ll need a new communications protocol, similar to the
RT command line but over a network.
The protocol could be stateless, like http or SOAP,
in which case you’ll have to do auth/auth on every call.
Or something with state, in which case you’ll have to
cache and garbage-collect objects on a per-connection basis.
(And if you do cache objects, you have to make sure some other
process didn’t change the underlying data during the caching.)
Are you planning some higher-level API? That way, a XUL client
could say “Retrieve all the info about all my queues and tickets
in a deep structure”, or would you use a low-level api and break
that into many different calls? (Maybe give each object
a remote-api?)
bobg