In the interests of getting crap done, as soon as I was finished with my previous post, I fired up TextMate and a couple Terminal windows to start writing a Ruby wrapper for the DAS API.

It started out great! Wanting to avoid the minor hassle I ran into before with Ruby's built-in Net::HTTP library, I did a quick search for Ruby HTTP/REST libraries and picked one that worked well, named HTTParty. Before long, I had the rudimentary elements of a Notes API working, with classes to represent the server connection, NotesDatabase, and NotesView.

I was about to start working on the NotesViewEntry class when I decided I'll need a way to page through the view, since the call to the view "collection" (wisely) doesn't return all of the data at once. The API developers cleverly store this information in an HTTP header:

Content-Range: items 0-9/35

Perfect! But, um... I was getting the list of available forums as Anonymous, which can only see two, not all 35. Sure enough, the results only contained the two Reader-visible entries (phew), but that left a showstopping problem: I have fairly frequent need for the count of entries, and I don't relish the notion of having to fetch all of the data to get that. Crap.

So DAS is out for now. I remembered, though, about ?ReadViewEntries, an older and thus clearly more mature data-access API. I could probably do everything view-related I need with that and then use DAS to get any non-view document data. So I hit the view with ?ReadViewEntries&OutputFormat=JSON (the results are the same with the XML version) and, lo and behold, the top-level object fields (with data snipped) revealed the same lack of Reader knowledge:

{ "@timestamp": "20120123T034916,85Z", "@toplevelentries": "35" }

Crap!

My quest to treat Domino like a standalone database is off to a rocky start. I can think of a few remaining options:

1. COM: I don't deploy on Windows, so... that's out.
2. C API: seems like overkill and just asking for all sorts of new bugs.
3. Web Services: MIGHT work, but I can't imagine the performance would be anywhere near acceptable.
4. Some sort of crazy thing with servlets: seems too crazy.
5. JRuby and the Domino Java CORBA API.

I think the last is the most plausible. My forum app already has Java classes in between the XPages front-end and the Domino database, so I could possibly take those wholesale and just change the methods I use to get the session and current database to instead initialize a CORBA session. I'm a bit nervous about speed and running across some of the various "not implemented in CORBA" landmines hidden across the API, but it might just work. If it does, my next task will be deciding on a web server and a Ruby web framework that's not terribly SQL-centric.