[LLVMdev] Proposal: REST and Ajax in LNT

[Renato Golin]

On 30 June 2015 at 19:53, Chris Matthews <chris.matthews at apple.com> wrote:
> I think it would be super useful to give LNT a RESTful interface.  As LNT
> grows, it would be nice to be able to update some of the pages with Ajax(or
> json).  Especially for pages with long load times, it makes sense to be able
> to speed up load times, by fetching the data after page load. It would also
> allow us to build more dynamic pages, and allow non-web clients better
> structured access to LNT information.

Hi Chris,

As to what technology we use, I'm not particularly fussy, but REST can
be a double edge sword, especially if your server is already fully
loaded, like LNT.

I'm not against it, by all means, I do believe it's the simplest and
most efficient of web interfaces, particularly for dynamic websites
like you propose. But we need to solve the stability problem first, or
REST+Ajax will only make it worse.

It may get the bare page quicker, but it will also load the server for
longer, and multiply the number of database connections to the server,
which is our main problem.

Once we solve the slow queries problem, and increase the number of
concurrent connections to a limit that we know we can handle, I'm all
up for using whatever RESTful technology you like. :)

cheers,
--renato