Monday, July 25, 2011

GSoC 2011 Integration with External APIs: Melange Lists and GData API Protocol - W9

Hi,
Last week, I started to work on "Melange list exporting to GDocs" that will be second deliverable of my project. I've been searcing through GData Protocol to use JavaScript for  Spreadsheets API. This API is used required to create a spreadsheet and manage it. Unfortunately there isn't a JS API for this provided by Google. But GData APIs are built on REST like protocols over HTTP. This gives possibilty to anyone to use them with any language as long as correct HTTP requests are provided.

Well, we want to use Spreadsheets API with JS, but i haven't tell the reason yet. Reason is we can not trust how big the data is. For example it's quite big enough for accepted stundents page. GAE has a limitatation, max 30 seconds per request. Melange loads some of the lists with multiple requests, but when we want to create and upload a list we can't make it with multiple request (or that would be really harder). So we need to export data on client side.

This also saves time preventing reprocessing of query. Another benefit is that, it allows uploading modified list on client-side. For example, user may filter list for a parameter, or sort it on client side. With this approach we present user a feature like, "what you see is what you export" that is exactly what user wants.

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