Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[John Doig <john AT creativecommons.org>]

Hi everybody,

I'm delighted to announce that we've recently updated our REST API with some exciting performance enhancements, bug fixes, and improvements to the developer documentation!

The most up-to-date version of the CC REST API is now rooted at http://api.creativecommons.org/rest/staging/.

To read more about this release, visit the staging version's documentation. http://api.creativecommons.org/docs/readme_staging.html

The staging and development APIs are currently in beta, and we are soliciting feedback and suggestions. As such, the API may change in the future.

The staging version of the CC REST API has been entirely rewritten to be more maintainable, faster, and stable.

Boasting points:
* Cleaner CC0 implementation
* Lightened dependencies
* Ease of extensibility
* Improved documentation
* Comprehensive and rigorous test suite
* CC "sanity" work use case!

To iterate on a couple of those points:

Improved documentation --- The main focus of improving the REST API's documentation was to reduce the amount of confusion surrounding how the individual work-info elements affect an HTML+RDFa license result. The most up-to-date documentation for this release can be found at http://api.creativecommons.org/docs/readme_staging.html#providing-work-information, which elaborates more on this issue.

CC0 --- In order to get CC0 into previous versions of the REST API, a grotesque monkey-patch was required [1]. The patch resulted in longer response times for CC0 issues than the typical latency experienced with the standard licenses' requests. This has been resolved in the latest release, and the CC0 integration has been tremendously improved. We have also corrected the inconsistencies that existed between CC0 and standard license issues in how work-info elements were handled in the HTM+RDFa output.

Some background on why this work was needed...

Historically, the REST API's issued parametrized license results via the license_xsl library, the same library that powered the license chooser accessible at http://creativecommons.org/choose/. license_xsl relies on XML/XSLT for it's core logic and over the years has become increasingly difficult to maintain and bloated. This made things to difficult to scale our services as the CC organization continues to grows -- recall how long it took for us to get around to supporting CC0 :)

license_xsl is to be relieved of it's duties at CC by the cc.license project sometime here in the near future. The newly built CC API is one such example of a license_xsl decommission. The REST API is now backed by the cc.license library, which provides the API's core logic for issuing licenses based upon sets of user parameters.

Your comments, feedback and suggestions can be sent to cc-devel AT creativecommons.org and are always very welcomed and encouraged :)

Regards,
John Doig
JED3 @ irc.freenode.net/cc

[1] "insane monkey-patch": http://code.creativecommons.org/viewsvn/api/branches/nose-test-suite-branch/support.py?r1=10185&r2=14085