introduce REST API

[typekpb]

I like the idea of saving the form config, however to make things even more comfortable, I'd like to see REST API.

My understanding of REST API would be:

• URL is the only input
• returned response would be the output (the same result as is currently returned once I fill the form and click "Generate" button)
• no need to run the url in browser (wget/curl) should do the job as well

Then I could generate the data with simple wget/curl GET/POST call. That would basically mean, I would not need anything except URL to remember. This would make generatedata stateless, I could run the URL on any server where the generatedata is installed.

To make things easy and reproducible, extra field could be auto-generated/auto-updated on web site, showing the query to run for the same result.

The next step would be some flag in URL to decide:

• just prefill the site form and display or
• generate data and return in HTTP response

[benkeen]

Yeah, this is a terrific idea!

• First, we'd need to send POST requests, not just GET. GET would be great, but to be able to specify precisely what you need in a data set, any request would get uber-long, really fast - pushing it over the 3 or so thousand chars generally allowed in query strings.
• Each module would need to be well-defined and specify exactly what options are available for it. That way, the API users would know how to construct the request to send to the API.
• Speaking practically, perhaps the existing generator could also output a REST call version of the data set so it would effectively act as a generator for the REST requests themselves as well? That would allow developers to quickly construct the REST request, which they could tweak programmatically if they wanted.

Definitely a fair bit of work, but I think it would be worthwhile... I'll give it some thought.

Ben