[midPoint] MidPoint RESTful service and API's?

[Radovan Semancik]

Hello Nik,

The plan for REST is to add at least partial support for REST/XML 
combination in 2.3 release which is planned for autumn this year. We are 
actually prototyping it right now. The REST/JSON interface is planned 
for later releases (no specific dates yet). The presence of 
other-than-SOAP interfaces was considered early in the architectural 
process so it should not be too difficult to implement. But the devil is 
in the detail therefore we tend to be quite conservative in promising 
any dates.

Yet, there may be an inherent limitation to REST interface with respect 
to how WOA/ROA works. E.g. difficulty of executing several operations on 
related resources in a transaction-like manner, batching operations and 
so on. The Java API and also possibly SOAP (or similar RPC-based) 
approaches will most likely be more powerful than REST can ever 
practically be. And that's also one of the reasons why we have SOAP. 
SOAP is far from being perfect, but honestly, when used well it is still 
much more powerful than contemporary REST interfaces. Especially when it 
comes to schema support, generating of compile-time code and so on. And 
midPoint is schema-based from bottom to top. It took quite a lot of 
effort to create a system in this way but it was well worth it. It 
brings a lot of advantages. Some of that can be seen even now (e.g. 
dynamic account form in GUI), but much more is yet to come. Therefore 
until we find good equivalent for SOAP the existing SOAP interface is 
here to stay and it will also be developed. And having said that we 
really *are* looking for good SOAP alternatives but we are not finding any.

But I totally agree that REST interface has a better price/performance 
ratio and it may be much more appropriate for simpler integration 
scenarios. Therefore it is quite high on our priority list.

-- 

                                            Radovan Semancik
                                           Software Architect
                                              evolveum.com



On 04/09/2013 10:20 AM, Nik wrote:
> I have been evaluating your midPoint IDM offering as a role 
> manager/RBAC solution for our account ldap repository in our product. 
> It seems very nice, compact and thankfully quite easy to set-up and 
> get working cf with some other opensource idms I have evaluated. Thank 
> you for your efforts to bring this product to public attention under 
> CDDL as well.
>
> I do have one burning question about midPoint's future features (it 
> concerns your road map, I guess). Are you planning on adding a RESTful 
> http/interface and/or REST APIs for webservices in midPoint, soon? I 
> have noticed mention of SOAP webservices and can understand why you 
> would wish to include this, based on it's wide historical adoption in 
> the IDM world.
>
> Best Regards,
> Nik
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