[vbox-dev] API Bugs

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Ian,

On 01.06.2015 08:54, Ian Chapman wrote:
> Hi Devs,
>
> I believe there's a few API bugs (via the web service interface) which
> have existed for a while, which I could probably demonstate by writing
> some test code in Perl.

Hmmm... the Perl interface to the web service API is extremely limited, 
because the ZSI module doesn't handle a good portion of the SOAP 
specification, which makes a lot of the API calls unreachable.

This incompleteness is the reason why we dropped the Perl webservice 
stuff from the VirtualBox SDK in the upcoming 5.0 version. The stub 
generator wastes many minutes of CPU time during the build, and its 
output isn't terribly useful.

When we need to access the API from a scripting language we normally use 
Python these days, as it covers all API "flavors" (COM, XPCOM, 
webservice). With a little care one can write code which works with all 
of them, without the need to sprinkle the code with conditionals.

> Is that something worth doing?

Depends... if it's showing the limitation of the ZSI stuff we can't do 
much. If it shows a genuine case where the API behaves incorrectly we 
absolutely want to know. Throw an example in our direction and we'll see.

Klaus