[haiku] Re: GSoC Web Services Kit OS integration

Tom Fairfield ha scritto:
The only thing which I am missing is some kind of vision for how Haiku applications could make use of the Services Kit (how about "Web Services Kit"?) in a cross-service way. Ie the user defines his preferred communication service in a Haiku preflet and applications using the Services Kit can provide certain basic team work features across any of the possible services without knowing the specific service.
My first thought about this project was to just implement a less generic API. Something that would wrap the REST API and provide classes for HTTP/HTTPS, authentication, MD5 hashes, etc... 

But I do feel that a IM Kit alike design would be better.
I've been thinking this over and doing some reading. I guess the basic idea is that the user can choose "Use Twitter as communication when possible" and then any app that makes use of the Web Services Kit (in a generic sense, obviously an app could also specifically use Facebook, for example) would use Twitter as a means of communication.
The preflet as I intended it to be in the first place would be the place where people configure their accounts, it could also be extended to store different identities that can also be used by the IM Kit in the future. 
As I see it, every service would expose some capabilities.
Twitter is only capable of microblogging, while Facebook does microblogging, photos, notes, groups, etc... A twitter client implemented using the Services Kit would then query the kit to know what configured accounts can do microblogging and let the user choose the right account.
What I'm still looking for is some examples of applications that would work in this way. I can come up with a somewhat contrived example of a application like "Haiku quotes of the day" that allows a user to enter a quote and then collects and displays the communities quotes. I'm sure, however, that there are much more useful applications for something like this. Does anybody have any suggestions? I think that implementing the tighter OS integration is definitely a path to take - it sticks with the Haiku philosophy of being an operating system where everything works together.
- An import/export functionality for bookmarks (del.icio.us), this will be useful when we will have a native browser 
- Google documents implemented as a userland file system
- An application to write and post to blogs
- A plugin to export albums for PhotoGrabber

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