[WOOKIE-414] Decrease preferences protocol overhead

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Fix Version/s: 2.0.0
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Michael Aram
• Created: 02/May/13 14:23
• Updated: 07/Mar/14 15:47

Description

Consider a use case, where you automatically embed Wookie widgets and have to configure them a bit. Think of a news reader widget that gets a concrete news feed URL set as a parameter on startup.

The problem with the current API is, though, that it allows us only to set parameters one by one. This results in a unnecessary network overhead, as the container has to send e.g. 6 HTTP requests (for a widget with 5 preferences) to Wookie before being able to deploy the Wookie-Widget-Instance-URL of the correctly configured widget-instance to the users browser. (Another, minor problem is the existence of an unconfigured or partly configured widget instance in the course of this transaction.)

Therefore, I propose to extend the REST API so that it allows one to send an additional JSON (member) object containing widget properties when instantiating a widget. Resulting in 1 HTTP request only between container and Wookie.