In October 2007, straight out of Viable Paradise, I started work at Canonical, the company that makes the Ubuntu Linux distribution. I work on Launchpad, a web application for coordinating open source software development. You may have noticed similarities--eldritch similarities--to my previous full-time job at CollabNet, where I worked on a web application for coordinating open source style software development.
Well, anyway, Launchpad now exposes a RESTful web service. I built a framework on top of Zope, and my manager Francis Lacoste wrote a nice set of Python decorators on top of my framework. The combination of the two means that a Launchpad programmer can do a little bit of additional work in their Zope interfaces, and the objects that implement those interfaces will be published RESTfully through Launchpad's web service. As we work behind the scenes, more of Launchpad comes online through the service.
My goal is quality without compromise. If there are problems with the design (which there are) I consider them bugs to be fixed. On the client side I want to provide a web service browser: a program that works by navigating hypermedia documents, but is as easy to program against as a bunch of statically-typed crap generated from a WSDL file. To that end I've written launchpadlib, which has some Launchpad-specific hacks in it, but is based on the generic wadllib. The Launchpad-specific ideas are similar to the emerging standards around RESTful JSON. I can give more details if people are interested.
I'm posting weekly updates about our progress on the Launchpad weblog. On Tuesday I'll be giving an IRC Q&A as part of Ubuntu Developer Week. But I'd recommend not crashing that chat if you're just interested in the architecture, because it's for people who want to write Launchpad clients to help with development. I'll be discussing the architecture and the development process as part of my talk at QCon in November.
Sat Aug 30 2008 16:41 What I Do:
For nearly a year I haven't told you about my job, mostly out of inertia. I took the job as a way to pay the mortgage on my mother's house, and for a while I was afraid it wouldn't produce anything I could be proud of, so I didn't really play it up, but those reasons are now moot. And now that I want to start talking about what I've done, some background would be nice.
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