Comment 5 for bug 781600

On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 12:56 PM, Gustavo Niemeyer <email address hidden> wrote:
> Note that it's not just a bit more, but _a lot_ more information.  All
> we need is really just a couple of strings (location, revid).  Compare
> that with the 40+ (!) fields of a branch, including the _whiteboard_.
> Then, imagine iterating over a potentially long list of these.  I'm
> generally against early optimization, but this is a lot of overhead.

So the current Launchpad API is very much about exporting /objects/.
This is why its so flexible, and why its so slow. AIUI its baked into
lazr.restful at a fairly deep level.

We're expecting that you will want to examine between 1K and 20K
objects; this is probably outside what we can reliably do in 1 second
even for the minimal data - so will need batching etc.

However, we can do a view returning json of the results of your query,
with batching, pretty easily, even if the API framework would be in
our way.

So I'm in favour of us having an *unstable* (that is, devel only, no
long term support guarantee) API that precisely fits your needs.
Should we need to change it in future we'd coordinate that with you :
the lack of long term support guarantee says that we're not supporting
this for shipping in API clients on the next Ubuntu LTS (if you need
that, you should say so now). Generally for webapps and
backend-in-the-datacentre unstable APIs are fine - we don't change
them willy-nilly.

-Rob