| Re: [orion-dev] LOTD -- It's not all about the Plugins... |
funny you mention this. Anton and I were talking last week about what it would take to integrate one of the myriad web-based sprite generators into Orion so that you could just select a folder and invoke the tool. I was thinking that there were just a few small "pipes" we need in Orion to work with these tools, such as...."make a zip available on a public URL to feed to a tool."
It's like piping unix commands together. In the pixlr plugin we did some work to save a file back from a URL specified in a web API. This pattern should become rather standard, and we should be able to encourage tool writers to adopt this approach for returning a file (if they don't already.) We should be able to export to a zip at a URL and feed that to a tool, etc.
With just a few simple pipes, and making it a no brainer for these small tools to supply a web API, we could easily weave together workflows in Orion.
So it seems to me the work in 2.0 is to make sure we understand what API's are available for these tools, supply the input pipes, be able to save the result, then encourage web tools that don't have an API to use these pipes. For example, if we can let users select a group of files/folders to generate a zip at a URL to pass to a web API, and then look for files to save back, we could go a long way. And then where these tools don't already have a web API, encourage them to accept these simple inputs.
Plugins are then just piping together these workflows.
susan
Simon Kaegi ---10/27/2012 06:45:49 PM---I was chatting with Boris and he sent me this great link... (originally from JJB)
From: Simon Kaegi <Simon_Kaegi@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: Orion developer discussions <orion-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 10/27/2012 06:45 PM
Subject: [orion-dev] LOTD -- It's not all about the Plugins...
Sent by: orion-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
