Show HN: libsaas, it's libcloud for SaaS

by dmarinoc • 14 years ago

46 23 14 years ago

someone13• 14 years ago

Didn't want to test this, in case it's actually a problem, but the usage examples seem to include your Mailchimp key. You may want to remove that :-)

aitorciki• 14 years ago

Don't worry, it's not a real key, just a random one following Mailchimp's key conventions :)

wulczer4• 14 years ago

It's not a real key, just a random hash to make the example feel more real. Seems we hit the Uncanny Valley of code examples ;)

olegp2• 14 years ago

I have written something similar in JavaScript: https://github.com/olegp/restwrapper

johns2• 14 years ago

This is higher level than a generic REST client.

alttab3• 14 years ago

What about cross domain requests?

olegp2• 14 years ago

It's server side JavaScript with an option to proxy to the browser if needed.

jeffbarr• 14 years ago

Isn't this what web services were promising us? Cool library, but ideally the SaaS apps would export APIs for this functionality.

johns2• 14 years ago

This is using the services' APIs, but standardizing as much as possible the Python code required to use them.

wulczer4• 14 years ago

The lowest common denominator of SaaS APIs is HTTP. Apart from that, everyone does it different.

Some use JSON, some use XML, some use SOAP... Sometimes you authenticate with Basic authentication, sometimes you use OAuth 1.0 and need to sign each request, sometimes it's OAuth 2.0 and you just need the token. Oh, and the actual GET parameter for the token is different, too...

There are APIs where you need to set a 'X-API-Version' header to something, or you'll get weird results. The list goes on...

The goal here is to hide all that crap from developers and focus on achieving the desired result.

thereason• 14 years ago

Instead of hiding it, why don't we ditch it altogether? HTTP is simpler, more direct and easier to debug. By sticking to HTTP, we might get closer to a situation where "everyone does it the same". Life might be easier.

Nah, it would never work. Pay no mind. I'm just a fool.

jmonegro• 14 years ago

I quite like it. I'll get to porting it to Ruby.

sgrove• 14 years ago

Please do, would be very awesome!

wulczer4• 14 years ago

There were some very sketchy plans about making this multilanguage... The best we could come up with was writing a small C module that would call Python code and that you could wrap in other languages.

If anyone has a better idea on how to keep the logic in one language, but make it accessible to everyone (preferably without inventing a whole DSL, that would end up being just like a real programming language, but worse), please speak up!

drivebyacct24• 14 years ago

>a small C module that would call Python code

Seems strange to me. Seems like for a lot of this, where it's often HTTP based anyway, you could implement much of it in C without it being a complete nightmare.

bryanh• 14 years ago

Very impressive. At Zapier we're building an internal tool very similar to this (and in Python to boot). Maybe we should hook up?

wulczer4• 14 years ago

That would be awesome! Hit us up on contact@ducksboard.com (or my profile email)

Show HN: libsaas, it's libcloud for SaaS

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