Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Asheesh Laroia <asheesh AT creativecommons.org>]

On Fri, 5 Oct 2007, Kevin Ollivier wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm working on integrating a Creative Commons license chooser into a
> wxPython application using ccwsclient, and one thing I'm noticing is
> that when using the REST service, there is (expectedly) a brief delay
> after switching options. Of course, it can make the application
> appear sluggish to those who don't realize it is connecting to the
> Internet, and ideally I'd like to make it possible to choose a
> license without connecting at all. So I was wondering - is there some
> recommended way to cache data or check against the server to see if
> there are new options, etc. available?

Hey Kevin,

Glad to see you on cc-devel.  I think we met on #cc a few days back.

A naive implementation of a set of Python REST API calls would make the 
whole app freeze, including making the UI nonresponsive, while the client 
waits for a response from our API server.  A slicker implementation would 
be event-based and could return immediately, setting up a callback 
function that will be called so that your app can continue to operate 
while waiting for the response.

I didn't write the Python wrapper you're using, but my guess it's in the 
former style.  I know I haven't yet answered your question, but in general 
I just want to mention that event-based programming can make life 
easier.  (Maybe we already do that and I'm just unknowingly promoting 
our existing work, I haven't checked.)

Looking at http://api.creativecommons.org/docs/readme_15.html , there is 
no "freshness" measure that I can see.  If you were particularly twisted 
(!), you could download the source to our API and just bundle the smarts 
of it with your app, distributing updated license information at the same 
time we do by just watching our Subversion tree.

But that defeats the point of using the API, which is to let you get 
updated jurisdiction info without releasing an update to your app.

So in summary, "No", we provide no built-in way to let you cache our 
responses and ensure that you don't keep a stale cache.  Nathan Y., maybe 
you can elaborate on your ideas on if this would be a useful thing to do 
and if we'll ever get to it given the rest of our workload.

-- Asheesh.

--
To err is human, to purr feline.
To err is human, two curs canine.
To err is human, to moo bovine.